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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

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