🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

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

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

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 fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.