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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming 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 wonderful part for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.