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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.