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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with boring, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

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