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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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