Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Part to Reflect Her Talent. She Grasped It with Style and Delight
In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.
Originating on Stage to Cinema
The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.
Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley Valentine
The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.
Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Post-Valentine Work
After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.
She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.
Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Fun
Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.
But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.