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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer 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 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to experience the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.