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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

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