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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming local, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

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

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.