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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

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