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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.