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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a superb part for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.