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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.