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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

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