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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a older actress, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, uninspired country with boring, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.