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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie 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 small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.