🔗 Share this article

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer 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 celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances 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 league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

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