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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.