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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, 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 Comedy

Director 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 dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.