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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the film's name.

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