🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.