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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

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

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.