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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known figure on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy older-age 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 subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.