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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film 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 Small Comeback in Comedy

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

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.