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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title.

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