Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Part to Match Her Talent. She Grasped It with Style and Delight

In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful film version. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.