The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Talent. She Grasped It with Style and Joy

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a excellent role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.