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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.