The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Talent. She Embraced It with Flair and Glee

During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

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

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, dull people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.