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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying elderly stories about old people, 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 subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film 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, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.