Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Role to Match Her Skill. She Grasped It with Style and Delight

In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely 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

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.