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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.