Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Match Her Ability. She Embraced It with Elegance and Glee
In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.
The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.
Starting in Theater to Screen
The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era 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’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley's Journey
The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Later Career
After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.
She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.
However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Fun
Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.
