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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

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