🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (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.

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