🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's 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 servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker 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 dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.

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