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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.