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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the film's name.

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