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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.