🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.