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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright film with a wonderful role for a older actress, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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