🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a excellent role for a older actress, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

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