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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.