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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a familiar star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

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

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.