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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.