🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

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