Shirley Valentine Provided Pauline Collins a Character to Reflect Her Skill. She Embraced It with Style and Glee
During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.
The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a excellent character for a older actress, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.
From Stage to Film
It started from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Story of The Film's Heroine
Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Humor
Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.