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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the similar 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 realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.