🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.