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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was 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 Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.