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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

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