🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a superb role for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.