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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent character for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

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