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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.