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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.