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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks 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 parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

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