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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, bright story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

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

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.