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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.