🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.