Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Style and Glee
During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.
The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.
From Stage to Cinema
It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.
She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
The Plot of The Film's Heroine
The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Subsequent Roles
After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.
But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Humor
Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.
