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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb part 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 foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This closely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker 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 returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

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