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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.