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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a wonderful character for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.