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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.