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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.