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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.