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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

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