The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Reflect Her Talent. She Seized It with Elegance and Glee
In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine
However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.
Originating on Stage to Screen
It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.
She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley's Journey
The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.
Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.
She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.
Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Humor
Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although 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.
However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.
