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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 each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.