The Shirley Valentine Role Provided Pauline Collins a Character to Match Her Ability. She Embraced It with Flair and Joy

In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular 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 shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.