The Shirley Valentine Role Offered This Talented Actress a Character to Equal Her Ability. She Seized It with Flair and Joy
In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.
Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.
The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film
Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright story with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.
From Stage to Screen
The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.
She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie 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 realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.
Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”
Post-Valentine Work
Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.
She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo GarcĂa’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.
But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.
A Small Comeback in Fun
Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.
Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.