The Shirley Valentine Role Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Match Her Ability. She Seized It with Flair and Glee

In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, 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 poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.