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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.