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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.