Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Character to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Style and Glee

In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.