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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.