Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Skill. She Embraced It with Elegance and Glee

In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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