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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.