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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy silver-years stories 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 subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director 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 psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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