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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable figure 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 bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic story with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with boring, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.