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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.