🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely followed the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

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

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