🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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