The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Talent. She Grasped It with Elegance and Joy

In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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