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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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