🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

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