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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.