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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

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

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

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