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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.