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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent character for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.