Shirley Valentine Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Skill. She Embraced It with Elegance and Glee

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a excellent character for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred 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 trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, 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 French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

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

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.