🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright film with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.