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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories 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 actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.