The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Role to Equal Her Talent. She Grasped It with Flair and Delight

During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.