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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.