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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.