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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.