The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Part to Equal Her Skill. She Embraced It with Flair and Delight

During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories 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 Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.