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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.