Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Talent. She Seized It with Elegance and Joy
During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.
Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.
From Stage to Cinema
It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.
Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley's Journey
The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.
Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.
But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Fun
Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the title.
However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.
