Shirley Valentine Provided Pauline Collins a Character to Match Her Talent. She Embraced It with Flair and Glee

In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.