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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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