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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.