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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.