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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a minor role) 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 tremendous moment in the sun.