🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories 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 Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.