The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Equal Her Skill. She Embraced It with Style and Glee

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured 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 transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director 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 psychic hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.