Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Equal Her Skill. She Embraced It with Flair and Delight

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.