The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Match Her Skill. She Seized It with Flair and Delight

During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.