Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Role to Reflect Her Ability. She Seized It with Elegance and Glee
During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.
Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.
Starting in Theater to Film
It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.
She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley's Journey
Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.
Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.
She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.
But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Brief Return in Fun
Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.
However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.
