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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.