Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Match Her Ability. She Grasped It with Elegance and Glee

During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a superb part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

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