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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.