🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar star on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

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

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

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

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