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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.