🔗 Share this article Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Ability. She Grasped It with Style and Joy In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then. She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly. The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women. Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility. Starting in Theater to Film It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood. She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita. The Story of The Film's Heroine Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti. Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?” Subsequent Roles Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character. She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper. But she found herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins. A Brief Return in Comedy Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title. However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.