🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his 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 tremendous moment in the sun.