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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.