Shirley Valentine Offered This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Skill. She Seized It with Style and Delight

In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.