The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Talent. She Embraced It with Style and Glee

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.