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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

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

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.