The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Equal Her Skill. She Grasped It with Style and Delight
In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
Yet the highlight of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
Originating on Stage to Screen
The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.
She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of The Film's Heroine
Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.
Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Subsequent Roles
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.
However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Fun
Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the title.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.
