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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired place with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.