Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Equal Her Ability. She Grasped It with Elegance and Delight
During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.
Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.
From Stage to Screen
It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.
She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit film version. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Plot of The Film's Heroine
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.
Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Later Career
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo GarcĂa's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.
Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Humor
Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the title.
However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.