The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Part to Reflect Her Talent. She Embraced It with Flair and Delight

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

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