In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
From Stage to Cinema
It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.
She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley Valentine
Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.
She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, 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 director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.
But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Comedy
Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.
