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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

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