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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright film with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

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