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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.

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