Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Talent. She Embraced It with Elegance and Delight

During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of 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 life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

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