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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series 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 relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.