In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic film with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.
This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.
Originating on Stage to Film
It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.
Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of The Film's Heroine
Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Subsequent Roles
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.
She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.
However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Comedy
Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.
