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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a familiar star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous local, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

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