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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.