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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

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

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

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