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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 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 transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.