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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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