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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

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

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the film's name.

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