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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean 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 housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.