Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Ability. She Embraced It with Flair and Delight
In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She became a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic film with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.
She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley's Journey
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Later Career
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She was in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo GarcĂa's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.
However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Humor
Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the title.
But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.
