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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

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

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected 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 Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.