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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.