Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Skill. She Seized It with Flair and Joy

In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years films 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 Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.