Shirley Valentine Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Ability. She Grasped It with Style and Glee
During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.
This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.
From Stage to Film
It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley Valentine
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.
But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films 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 actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Humor
Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.
However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.