🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.