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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age 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 set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.