🔗 Share this article The Shirley Valentine Role Provided Pauline Collins a Role to Match Her Ability. She Grasped It with Flair and Delight In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then. Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly. Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth. Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility. From Stage to Screen The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy. She was hailed as the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita. The Narrative of Shirley Valentine Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti. Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?” Post-Valentine Work Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role. She was in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid. Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins. A Brief Return in Comedy Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title. However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.