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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit 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.

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