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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered 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 hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.