Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Talent. She Seized It with Style and Joy

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.