Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Role to Equal Her Skill. She Grasped It with Flair and Joy
In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley Valentine
Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, sharing 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 skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Later Career
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.
She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.
Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Fun
Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.
