The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Part to Match Her Skill. She Embraced It with Flair and Glee

During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about seniors, 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 Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (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.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.