Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Equal Her Ability. She Seized It with Elegance and Delight

During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.