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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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