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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a excellent role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

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

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.