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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker 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 Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.