🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.