The Shirley Valentine Role Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Ability. She Grasped It with Style and Glee
In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.
Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine
Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Film
It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley's Journey
Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.
Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in filmmaker Roland JoffĂ©'s passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.
But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like 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 Brief Return in Humor
Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the movie's title.
Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.