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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give 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.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.