🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.