Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Equal Her Skill. She Grasped It with Flair and Glee
During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film
Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.
This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
Originating on Stage to Cinema
It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.
She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of The Film's Heroine
Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.
Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Subsequent Roles
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.
Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Comedy
Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.
However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.
