🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a well-known figure 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.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.