🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.