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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

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

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

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