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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.