During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.
Starting in Theater to Film
It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley Valentine
Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.
Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.
She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.
However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film 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 Humor
Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.
