The Shirley Valentine Role Offered This Talented Actress a Role to Equal Her Ability. She Seized It with Style and Joy
In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.
Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Screen
The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.
She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley's Journey
The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo GarcĂa's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Humor
Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.
