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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, 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 the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.