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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

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