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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

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

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.