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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.