đź”— Share this article The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Reflect Her Skill. She Grasped It with Elegance and Joy During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day. She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly. Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright film with a excellent part for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth. Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility. Originating on Stage to Screen The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy. She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita. The Narrative of The Film's Heroine Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by Tom Conti. Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?” Post-Valentine Work Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character. She was in filmmaker Roland JoffĂ©'s decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo GarcĂa's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker. Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins. A Small Comeback in Fun Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title. Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.