🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable star on each side of the sea 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 bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.