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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

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