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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.