During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley Valentine
The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Later Career
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker 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 sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.
But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Comedy
Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.
But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.
