30 Film Females: Shirley Valentine (1989)

“Roses are red / Violets are blue / Richard Gere’s taken / So you’ll have to do” is the kind of thing I can imagine disillusioned Liverpudlian housewife Shirley Valentine saying.  Based on the one-woman play by Willy Russell, the film features Pauline Collins  – ably supported by friend Alison Steadman (AKA Mrs Bennett, Pamelaaa, etc.), neighbour Julie McKenzie (AKA Miss Marple, HRH in the 2012 Olympic helicopter!) and rediscovered schoolmate Joanna Lumley (AKA Purdy, Patsy, etc.) – as the eponymous forty-something who goes on a life-transforming holiday.  Russell also wrote Julie Walters’ breakout play-turned-film Educating Rita and the hit musical Blood Brothers (set not far from where I grew up in Lancashire), showing an flair for characterising strong Northern women.  I can’t remember when I first saw any of these productions, but it was likely at the behest of my late mum (a Yorkshire lass).

“I think sex is like supermarkets, you know, overrated. Just a lot of pushing and shoving and you still come out with very little at the end.”  This is a quote I (and I’m sure others struggling with fertility issues) can empathise with around unspontaneous potentially baby-making “timetabled sex”.  Now I’m lucky enough to have my toddler, I agree with the supermarket part even more – one-handedly pushing a screaming child around a shop should be an Olympic event!  Though I have to admit to being a loyal customer at Waitrose (the only big supermarket within walking distance of my house), so at least the pushing and shoving is mostly polite 😉

This leads me onto disappointing eggs.  In the film, Shirley’s husband (an irascible Bernard Hill) is aghast to find a dinner of “chips and egg” rather than his normal Thursday steak, which has been fed to the neighbour’s allegedly vegetarian dog.  Again, I can imagine a similar sentiment might resound with fertility patients – especially those undergoing ovarian stimulation and egg collection for IVF (thankfully, I never needed to go that far).   This gave me the idea for the drawing below, a somewhat childish representation of a meal/frowning face coloured in crayon – though the downturned mouth is formed with a sausage rather than a chip, and coloured red as opposed to a more scatological brown (not only because couldn’t find where my son had hidden the crayon).

Honourable mentions for 1989: a mature yet feisty Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy.  Secondly, Amanda Root voicing orphan Sophie in the Cosgrove Hall adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG – and also not forgetting Quentin Blake’s original artwork.