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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

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