đź”— Share this article The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Match Her Talent. She Grasped It with Elegance and Delight During the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then. Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly. The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence. This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked. From Stage to Film It started from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood. She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita. The Plot of Shirley's Journey Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with boring, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti. Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?” Later Career After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served 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 appeared in director Roland JoffĂ©'s decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker. Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins. A Small Comeback in Comedy Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title. However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.