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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a well-known figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with boring, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.