🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, 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 actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.