For Pauline Collins, a Real ‘Valentine’ of a Film Role

The last thing most women facing the far side of 40 and the near side of zaftig would want is to strip bare for a big-screen leap into the ocean. Not Shirley Valentine, who discovers the joys of such impetuous acts in the film of the same name, nor Pauline Collins, the actress who portrays the Manchester housewife uncaged.

“My only sorrow was that I wasn’t younger and thinner,” says Collins, who turned 49 Sunday. “But if I were Jamie Lee Curtis, I wouldn’t have been right for the part,” she adds with a girlish giggle, her popping-blue eyes wide in a halo of black lashes.

It wasn’t Collins’ first nude scene. She once went topless for a British television role. This one felt particularly comfortable, though, she believes, because of the company in which it was done: Her co-star, Tom Conti, who plays her Greek lover, Costas, is her real-life neighbor and has shared the London stage with her.

“It just felt like a laugh with him,” Collins says. “I was more worried about jumping off the boat, because I’m not a very good swimmer. When you see me smile as I surface, that is gratitude that I had not drowned.”

“Shirley Valentine” has given Collins much more to be grateful for. In London in 1987, she originated the title role in Willy Russell’s one-woman play of a stuck-in-a-rut housewife and mother who longs to find the girl she used to be. Its success led to Collins’ Broadway debut in the work, for which she won a Tony this spring.

Between its London-to-New York transfer, she starred in the film. Stage stars rarely get the chance to play their characters when it comes to making the film version, but producer-director Lewis Gilbert managed to win Paramount’s blessings for Collins in the lead. For her first major film role, however, she didn’t have to go it alone onscreen.

In translating his work to film, Russell (who collaborated with Gilbert on “Educating Rita”) gave human form to the characters that had previously existed only in Shirley Valentine’s head. Collins is happy with the results, with one qualification: “I always saw Costas as a bit dirtier than Tom, older, greasier and less glamorous. The person in my head had food down his shirt.”

Dressed in a comfortably tailored, mushroom-colored pants suit, her hair a shiny mass of dark red curls, Collins looks like Shirley at the end of her adventure, confident and relaxed with herself. She doesn’t share her character’s mid-life malaise, though Collins knows that many people do. It’s a problem that cuts across all barriers of class and gender.

After her London agent saw the show, she says, he told her, “ ‘I’m like that.’ He doesn’t throw the egg and chips at (his wife), but he comes off the train every night at 5:45, he gets to the house and she has to have a drink waiting for him and he eats at 6:30. That’s quite rigid for someone jet-setting around the world. People who commute are leading very regimented, limited lives. This doesn’t just apply to women.”

The story came to be told from a woman’s viewpoint only after Russell initially tried to write it in the words of Shirley’s husband, Joe. “But he found that men of this age and class weren’t comfortable expressing themselves, and weren’t easily wed to monologue,” Collins explains.

Shirley Valentine breaks through the limits of her life by accepting a girlfriend’s offer of a free trip to Greece. Seduced by the “sun, sand and taramasalata ,” Valentine has an affair with a smooth-talking local, falls in love with life and refuses to return to the confines of her row-house kitchen.

It’s a scenario Collins found to be plausible while filming in Mykonos. “There were lots of middle-aged Shirley Valentines who had gone there and stayed,” she says. Several were put to work on the film. “They had all left something behind, not necessarily marriage.”

They tended to be American women, however, rather than British. It was a difference Collins had noted while doing the play on both sides of the Atlantic. “In England, women wrote to say that they would like to (run away), now or in the future.” In New York, “women wrote to say they had done what Shirley Valentine did. Even people in their 60s have made that kind of leap in their lives. So you must be braver than us.”

Collins, on the other hand, feels that “I’ve been very lucky in my life. I haven’t had that kind of trap to flee.”

Raised near Liverpool by a headmaster father and schoolteacher mother, Collins grew up with the belief that men and women are equal.

“I was brought up by a man who was one of the early feminists. He had three daughters and always offered us everything that a boy would have--education and stuff. (My parents) had a completely shared domestic situation, they both worked, cooked, did the washing. He even washed nappies (diapers) by hand.

“That’s how I expected marriage to be,” she says with a bright smile. “And I’ve got one that is quite like that.”

Married to actor John Alderton, she’s worked with her husband onstage and in several limited series for British television, most notably “Upstairs, Downstairs,” in which she played the spunky maid Sarah and he was the earthy chauffeur Thomas. They have three children, aged 12 to 24, and usually share the domestic workload, though not always.

“He just spent five months holding down the fort at home while I was on Broadway.”

And if she wants to pull a Shirley Valentine by holidaying alone, that’s all right by him too. Last year, between the play’s London run and the start of a television series with her husband, she left on a 10-day solo adventure.

“I really wanted to be alone,” she explains. “I didn’t want to worry about anyone else, whether they were enjoying themselves.”

And where did she go? Mykonos? Majorca? Cozumel? Try St. Petersburg, Fla. “I thought that was a kind of safe place, surrounded by all those pensioners,” she says with a laugh. “I had a wonderful time.

“It’s amazing, people think when you’re on your own you’re going off to have wonderful sexual adventures. Here I am, on my own, going off to Disney World. What does that say about me?”