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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer 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 UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.