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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.