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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem 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 located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.