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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

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

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

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

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor 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 genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.