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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.