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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.