🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.