🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar star 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 spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.