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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.