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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously 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 Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas 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 Minor Role in Comedy

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

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.