🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

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

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.