The film for which the actor, who has died aged 85, is best-remembered is also that in which she was afforded most airtime. If only more film-makers had managed to channel her warm, sharp charm
P
auline 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.
