The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Part to Equal Her Talent. She Embraced It with Elegance and Joy

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright story with a excellent role for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered 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 hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.