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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

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

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.