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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead 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 returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

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