🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.