Shirley Valentine gave Pauline Collins a role that matched her talent. She captured it with elegance and joy film

pOlin Collins was a smart, funny and sexy actress in the 1970s who became a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic on the British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs and the Downton Abbey of her day.

She played Sarah, a vulnerable saloon maid with a dodgy past, who has an affair with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’ real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences loved and continued on the spin-offs Thomas and Sarah and frankly no.

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine: the liberated, naughty-but-sweet adventurer who paved the way for Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia! Films: A cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a brilliant role of a mature female heroine, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by the usual male ideas about demure youth. Shirley Valentine of Collins has envisioned the new debate around perimenopause and women who won’t give in to disappearing.

It stemmed from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willie Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the eager and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine in an escapist middle-aged comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway, then was triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version – following a similar journey from stage to screen to Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

Shirley Collins is a humble housewife bored with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, unimaginative people. So, when she wins the chance to spend a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and stays – to the amazement of the dim-witted British tourist she goes with – once the opportunity to experience the real thing outside the tourist complex is over, which means a glorious thrilling adventure with the evil local Kostas, played by Tom Conti with a mustache and a hideous accent.

Shirley always breaks the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking, and she sparked huge laughter in cinemas across the UK when Costas told her he loved his stretch marks and she told us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

After Valentine’s Day, Pauline Collins continued her vibrant career on stage and on television, including parts in Doctor Who, but she was not well served by films as there did not seem to be a writer at Russell University who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffe’s Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Heaven’s Way in 1997. In Rodrigo Garcia’s 2011 drama Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the world of Upstairs and Downstairs as a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly involved in condescending, garish entertainments about the elderly that were unsuitable for her, such as nursing home dramas such as Mrs. Caldecott’s Cabbage War and the Quartet, as well as the ruby ​​French film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

Woody Allen gave her a real comedic role (albeit a small one) in his film You’ll Meet a Tall Stranger, where she played the elusive fortune teller to which the title refers.

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