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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar figure on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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