🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with boring, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.