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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.