The Shirley Valentine Role Offered This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Ability. She Embraced It with Style and Joy
During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.
Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine
Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.
She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley's Journey
Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.
Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Later Career
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level maid.
Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Humor
Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.
