Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Reflect Her Skill. She Embraced It with Flair and Glee

In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a superb part for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.