🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.