The Shirley Valentine Role Offered This Talented Actress a Part to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Elegance and Delight
In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.
She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine
Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.
From Stage to Film
The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.
Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley's Journey
Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Later Career
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.
But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Fun
Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the movie's title.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.
