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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

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