🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in theaters 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?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.