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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

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