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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.