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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.