Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Skill. She Embraced It with Flair and Glee
In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a familiar star on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.
Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
Originating on Stage to Cinema
It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.
Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley Valentine
Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.
Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.
She appeared in filmmaker Roland JoffĂ©'s passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo GarcĂa's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs maid.
However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Humor
Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the title.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.
