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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired place with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.