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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a superb role for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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