🔗 Share this article Shirley Valentine Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Talent. She Seized It with Flair and Joy During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then. Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly. Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women. Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background. Starting in Theater to Film It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story. She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita. The Story of The Film's Heroine Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti. Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?” Subsequent Roles Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role. She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper. However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 the performer Joan Collins. A Brief Return in Fun Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title. However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.