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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.