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During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

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

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like 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 Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.