(Paramount Pictures)

 Sarah Longley moved to the US from Britain as a young teenager and met her husband at age 23. Soon after they married, she realized the relationship was not going to work, but was reluctant to end it. “I don’t think either of us married for the right reasons but we both tried to stick it through,” she remembers.

Then Sarah saw the 1989 romantic comedy Shirley Valentine, starring Pauline Collins as a restless, middle-aged housewife. As Shirley’s marriage is failing, she gets the courage to pursue her dreams of travel — without her husband. Shirley and a friend head to Greece on vacation, she has a fling, and ultimately recovers the confidence she lost so many years ago.

“The movie put the thought in my head that I could have a different life,” Sarah remembers. Within a year, she decided to leave her husband and had applied to the Culinary Institute of America. Although she worried about being available to her small children, “I also felt that they needed a good role model, and they needed somebody who stood up and did the right thing and was brave. And I needed to be that person and not the frightened person that I have been.”

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