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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part 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 escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.