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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.