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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, uninspired country with boring, dull people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

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

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.