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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, 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 good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish local, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

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