🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a familiar star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a excellent character for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.