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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.