đź”— Share this article Shirley Valentine Provided Pauline Collins a Part to Match Her Skill. She Grasped It with Style and Joy During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day. Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly. Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women. Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background. Originating on Stage to Film It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood. She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita. The Story of Shirley's Journey Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti. Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?” Later Career Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character. She appeared in director Roland JoffĂ©'s decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 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 GarcĂa's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker. But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins. A Minor Role in Comedy Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name. But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.