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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.