Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Part to Reflect Her Ability. She Embraced It with Flair and Delight

During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, uninspired nation with boring, dull folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.