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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a older actress, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, 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 subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

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

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.