🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with life in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.