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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.