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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.