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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.