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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with boring, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.