🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, 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 located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.