The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Reflect Her Skill. She Grasped It with Style and Joy
In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a wonderful role for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.
From Stage to Film
It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.
She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley Valentine
The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.
But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Comedy
Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.
