🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.