🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas 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 Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

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