Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Part to Match Her Talent. She Embraced It with Style and Delight
During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.
This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.
Originating on Stage to Screen
The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.
Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley Valentine
Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, 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 the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film 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 Small Comeback in Humor
Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.