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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.