🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like 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

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.