🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent role for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the movie's title.

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