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

In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She became a familiar figure on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.