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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in 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 Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.