🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired place with boring, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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