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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending 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 the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.