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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a excellent role for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.