🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a superb part for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.