The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Skill. She Embraced It with Style and Glee
In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.
Starting in Theater to Cinema
It started from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.
Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley's Journey
Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.
She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.
Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Comedy
Director 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 questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.
