Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Part to Equal Her Talent. She Seized It with Flair and Joy
During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.
Originating on Stage to Screen
The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley Valentine
The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.
Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Subsequent Roles
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in filmmaker Roland JoffĂ©'s passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level maid.
Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Humor
Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.
But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.
