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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.