The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Part to Match Her Ability. She Embraced It with Style and Glee
During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.
This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of The Film's Heroine
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Subsequent Roles
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.
Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Fun
Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the title.
Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.
