The Shirley Valentine Role Provided Pauline Collins a Role to Equal Her Ability. She Grasped It with Elegance and Glee

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.