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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play 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 tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.