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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.