Pauline Collins was the smart, funny, cherubically sexy female actor in the 1970s who became a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic in the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of its day.
She played Sarah, the pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past, who has a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved and which carried on into spinoff shows Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.
But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine: the liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure that paved the way for Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia! movies: a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by the usual male ideas about demure youth. Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.
Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version – very much following the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.
Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking and it got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.
But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.
