In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.
She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.
But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.
However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.
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