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During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: 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 Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.