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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

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

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.