The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Part to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Style and Joy

During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured 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 performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate 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 cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years entertainments 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 French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director 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 shady psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.