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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with boring, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, 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 located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.