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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.