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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew 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 pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

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 psychic alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.