🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.