🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming native, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film 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 Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

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