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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

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