🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the movie's title.

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