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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent role for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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