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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a excellent part for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

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

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.