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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.