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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

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

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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