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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.