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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.