🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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