In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.
She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry 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 director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.
However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.
But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.
Lena Hoffmann is a seasoned journalist with a passion for uncovering stories that matter, specializing in German current affairs and digital media trends.
