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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though 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.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.