🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It started 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 desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.