Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Part to Equal Her Ability. She Embraced It with Style and Glee
In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.
Starting in Theater to Film
The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.
She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Plot of The Film's Heroine
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.
Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.
Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Humor
Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.
However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.