🔗 Share this article The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Role to Equal Her Talent. She Seized It with Elegance and Glee During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day. She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly. The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence. Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked. Originating on Stage to Film The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood. She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita. The Plot of The Film's Heroine Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti. Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?” Subsequent Roles Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role. She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker. But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films 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 ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins. A Small Comeback in Humor Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title. Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.