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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

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

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.