🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.