Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Ability. She Grasped It with Style and Delight
In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine
However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.
Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.
From Stage to Screen
It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.
She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
The Narrative of The Film's Heroine
Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.
She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.
However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Fun
Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the title.
However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.
