During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.
However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
It started from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.
Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.
Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.
Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.
Elara is a financial strategist with over a decade of experience in wealth management and entrepreneurship.
