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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright story with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

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