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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.