Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Character to Equal Her Skill. She Embraced It with Style and Delight

During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.