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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic 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 parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

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