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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.