The Shirley Valentine Role Offered This Talented Actress a Part to Match Her Ability. She Seized It with Elegance and Glee
During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.
From Stage to Cinema
It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
The Plot of Shirley Valentine
The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative country with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.
Sassy, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.
She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.
But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Minor Role in Fun
Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the movie's title.
Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.
