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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

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