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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with monotonous, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

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