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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role 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 escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit film version. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years 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 Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.