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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age films about seniors, 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 Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.