Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Match Her Ability. She Grasped It with Style and Joy
In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. 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.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.
This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.
From Stage to Cinema
It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.
Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley Valentine
Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.
She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.
However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories 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 subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Comedy
Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.
However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.