đź”— Share this article Shirley Valentine Gave This Talented Actress a Role to Reflect Her Talent. She Embraced It with Elegance and Delight During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic 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 shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly. The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence. Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility. Starting in Theater to Film It started from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy. Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita. The Plot of Shirley Valentine The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti. Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?” Post-Valentine Work Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part. She was in director Roland JoffĂ©'s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo GarcĂa's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid. However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins. A Small Comeback in Comedy Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title. But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.