🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a superb part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, 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 poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.