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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.