🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with boring, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.