🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer 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 realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks 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 stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

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