🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.