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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

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

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.