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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie 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 provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.