Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Ability. She Embraced It with Style and Joy

During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.