🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with boring, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.