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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

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