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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming local, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.