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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, 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 Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories 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 poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

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