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During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known star on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a excellent role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

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

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

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