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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying elderly films 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 subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.