🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.