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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.