🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming local, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the film's name.

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