Shirley Valentine (film) 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 same title, which follows middle aged Shirley Valentine in an unexpected discovery of herself, and rekindling of her childhood dreams and youthful love of life. Pauline Collins reprises the titular lead role as middle-aged housewife Shirley, which she had previously played in the stage production in London's West End and on Broadway, and Tom Conti plays Costas Dimitriades, the owner of a Greek tavern with whom she has a
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