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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

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