Shirley Valentine Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Ability. She Grasped It with Style and Delight
In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.
The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine
However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.
This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.
From Stage to Screen
It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.
She turned into the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley's Journey
The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.
Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo GarcĂa's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.
But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Comedy
Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.
Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.
