Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Character to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Style and Delight
During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.
This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Film
It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.
Collins became the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley Valentine
Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo GarcĂa's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.
However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Humor
Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.
