Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Match Her Skill. She Seized It with Style and Joy
In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.
The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of The Film's Heroine
The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.
Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Subsequent Roles
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.
Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Fun
Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the title.
However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.