Willy Russell on Shirley Valentine

I can’t do male company. It all becomes about the latest car: ‘Did you really come down the A6?’ It’s about things. Put a group of women in a room and it’s about what’s in here.” (points to his heart) “I wrote the line, ‘I like a glass of wine when I’m doing the cooking.’ Then she turned around and said, ‘Don’t I, wall?’ And at that moment the play was born. And you knew immediately that’s how she survived. When I was writing her, I became witty. I remember when I wrote, ‘He kissed me stretch marks’, and then she suddenly said, ‘Aren’t men full of s—?’ And I fell off the chair laughing. It wasn’t as if I knew where I was going when I wrote that riff. I was just the conduit.

WILLY RUSSELL on Shirley Valentine

Men worked three shifts a day. My granny ran a mobile grocer’s on the estate, and often women getting together don’t think that the kids are listening. You aren’t necessarily through your ears, but through your pores.

WILLY RUSSELL, attributing his ability to inhabit the minds of female characters to a matriarchal upbringing after the war

I was a very bad hairdresser. The trade I managed to attract was because people could talk at me. Thinking back now, I was probably doing shampoos-and-sets for some women at the first stage of dementia. I can think of two or three. They would come in every week and tell me the same story about their husbands or the distant past. Some of that must have had a bearing on me later, at least feeling confident to write about women.

WILLY RUSSELL