Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Ability. She Embraced It with Flair and Delight
In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine
Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.
Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
The story began from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.
She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of The Film's Heroine
Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Later Career
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo GarcĂa's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Fun
Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.
