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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

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