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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.