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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the subject of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.