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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.