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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.