Shirley Valentine Provided Pauline Collins a Role to Match Her Talent. She Grasped It with Elegance and Delight

In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual 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 successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years films 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 poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

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

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.