The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Match Her Talent. She Seized It with Elegance and Delight

During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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