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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.