🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, 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 Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.