🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, 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 Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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