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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.