🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

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