Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Part to Reflect Her Talent. She Grasped It with Flair and Glee

During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with boring, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.