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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years 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 poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.