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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming local, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.