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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This closely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

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

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