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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta 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 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.