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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film 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 Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.