🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.