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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

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

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

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 dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.