Shirley Valentine (film) seem recycled directly from greeting cards . . . If there is a shred of plausibility in the film, it comes from Bernard Hill's performance as Shirley Valentine's husband. He isn't a bad bloke, just a tired and indifferent one, and when he follows his wife to Greece at the end of the film there are a few moments so truthful that they show up the artifice of the rest." Shirley Valentine (film) Shirley Valentine is an award-winning 1989 British romantic comedy-drama film directed by Lewis Gilbert. The screenplay by Willy Russell is based on his 1986 one-character play of
The Brothers (Shirley play) King's Men. Some scholars have assumed that Shirley wrote for the King's Men only in the final phase of his career, in 1640–42; but this is by no means a certainty. Shirley's long and productive connection with Queen Henrietta's Men dominated most of his career, though he wrote "Love in a Maze" for the King's Revels Men in 1632. The eccentric nineteenth-century critic F. G. Fleay originated the argument that the play that was published as "The Brothers" in 1653 is a revision of an otherwise-unknown play by Shirley titled "The Politic Father," which was licensed by the Master of