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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

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