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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired place with boring, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided 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 dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.