🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.