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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, 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

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 shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.