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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.