Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Talent. She Grasped It with Elegance and Delight
During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film
Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.
This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
From Stage to Screen
The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.
She was hailed as the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley Valentine
The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Later Career
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo GarcĂa's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.
But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Comedy
Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.
