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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

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

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.