🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) 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, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.