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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending 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 ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.