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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry 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 filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

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