🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war 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 manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.