🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.