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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director 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 clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.