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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a well-known star on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series 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. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.