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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.