🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give 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 shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.