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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar 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.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the title.

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