🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright story with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate 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 appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like 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 Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.