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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided 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 dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.