🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a superb role for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

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

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.