Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Equal Her Skill. She Embraced It with Elegance and Glee

In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.