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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported 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 was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

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