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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.