The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Elegance and Glee

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, 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 movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.