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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

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

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “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 Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.