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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed 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.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.