During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film
Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Screen
It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.
She was hailed as the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley Valentine
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Subsequent Roles
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.
But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Comedy
Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.
