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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “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 movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.