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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking 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 & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a excellent role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

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

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.