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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a older actress, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.