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During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

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

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided 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 fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.