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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.