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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.