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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories 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 subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.