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During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the alike path from play to movie 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 realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments 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 poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the title.

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