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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas 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, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

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