In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.
Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.
It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.
She turned into the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.
Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.
She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.
Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.
However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.
A seasoned gaming enthusiast with over a decade of experience in reviewing online casinos and sharing winning strategies.
