🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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