In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.
It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.
She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.
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 Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the title.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.
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