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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not 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 Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories 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 Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.