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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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