The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Part to Reflect Her Skill. She Seized It with Style and Delight
During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.
This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Film
It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.
She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley's Journey
Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.
Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.
She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Fun
Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.