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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

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