🔗 Share this article Shirley Valentine Offered Pauline Collins a Character to Reflect Her Ability. She Embraced It with Elegance and Glee During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era. She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly. Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth. This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked. Starting in Theater to Screen It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story. She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita. The Narrative of Shirley's Journey The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti. Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?” Post-Valentine Work After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part. She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid. But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins. A Minor Role in Comedy Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title. But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.