The Shirley Valentine Role Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Match Her Skill. She Grasped It with Style and Glee
During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.
This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
From Stage to Film
It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.
Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley Valentine
Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in director Roland JoffĂ©'s adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo GarcĂa's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Fun
Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.
But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.