The Shirley Valentine Role Offered This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Talent. She Seized It with Flair and Joy
In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.
Originating on Stage to Film
It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.
She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.
The Story of The Film's Heroine
The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.
Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Subsequent Roles
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.
She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.
However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Brief Return in Fun
Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.
Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.