🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

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