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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.