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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity 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 – remains once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish local, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his the film 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, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.