Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Skill. She Embraced It with Flair and Joy
In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.
She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.
The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.
Starting in Theater to Film
It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.
She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.
The Story of Shirley's Journey
Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.
Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
Later Career
After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Comedy
Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.
