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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

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

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

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

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.