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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful film version. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable people. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured 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 film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.