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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

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

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.