Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Equal Her Ability. She Grasped It with Elegance and Joy

During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, 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 poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.