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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired nation with monotonous, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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