🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

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