🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.