The Shirley Valentine Role Provided Pauline Collins a Character to Match Her Skill. She Embraced It with Elegance and Joy

During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

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

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like 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 Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.