Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Role to Match Her Ability. She Embraced It with Elegance and Glee
In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film
But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.
Originating on Stage to Screen
It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.
She turned into the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley's Journey
The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Subsequent Roles
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.
She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.
However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Fun
Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.
Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.
