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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.