Shirley Valentine Provided Pauline Collins a Part to Match Her Ability. She Seized It with Flair and Joy

In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.