🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, 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 not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.