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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.