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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

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

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.