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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

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