The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Reflect Her Skill. She Seized It with Flair and Joy
During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.
From Stage to Cinema
The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.
She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.
The Story of The Film's Heroine
Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.
Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level maid.
But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Humor
Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.
But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.
