🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, 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 UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.