đź”— Share this article The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Elegance and Glee In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day. She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly. Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth. Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked. Starting in Theater to Film It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood. She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita. The Plot of Shirley's Journey The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti. Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?” Post-Valentine Work Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role. She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper. However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins. A Small Comeback in Fun Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name. However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.