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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.