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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

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

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, 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 set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.