🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer 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 realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.