🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the starring part 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 getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain 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?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films 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 located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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