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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist 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, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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