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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

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