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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.