The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Ability. She Grasped It with Elegance and Glee

During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold 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 received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.