The Shirley Valentine Role Gave This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Skill. She Seized It with Elegance and Delight
During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.
Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine
But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.
Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.
Originating on Stage to Screen
It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.
She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.
The Narrative of Shirley's Journey
The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.
Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Later Career
After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.
She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.
However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about the aged, 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 set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Comedy
Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.
However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.