Pauline Collins obituary | film

Actress Pauline Collins, who has died aged 85 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was accustomed to jumping from one role to another, but she will forever be remembered for two parts: a parlor maid in the 1970s TV drama Upstairs Downstairs, at the mercy of her employers, and a woman in great control of her life in Willy Russell’s play and comedy Shirley Valentine.

“Too much security makes me nervous,” she once said, “and I’m afraid I’ll miss all the surprises on the horizon.” “One of the horrors of little success is the possibility of losing the ability to dare, to jump off a cliff.”

Collins’ biggest spotlight came when she played a bored Liverpool housewife in both the original West End and Broadway productions of Shirley Valentine, with Simon Callow directing. She made her one-man show debut at London’s Vaudeville Theater in 1988, where she dazzled a two-hour audience with a warm, funny monologue about Shirley escaping her monotonous life, cooking eggs and chips for her unappreciative husband, and “talking to the wall” by traveling to Greece and finding romance with a pub owner.

Although The Guardian’s critic felt that the first two acts were mainly “humorous”, the review praised Collins’s comic timing before, in the final act, giving “the sense of a real woman, all rosy tan, acknowledging that she is full of unused life”. In 1989, the production ran for 10 months at the Booth Theatre, New York, and Collins won a Tony Award for her performance to add to her Olivier Award the previous year.

When the story was adapted into a film, with Bernard Hale as Shirley’s husband and Tom Conti as her lover, Collins found cinematic fame, although it was not until Russell loyally latched onto her for the lead while Hollywood studio Paramount wanted an established American film actor. She won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Her career until then was limited to theater and television. She was at the heart of the story when Upstairs Downstairs began in 1971, with her character, Sarah Moffat, taking a job as a parlor maid at the Bellamy House at 165 Eaton Place, in London’s fashionable Belgravia district. The Downstairs staff quickly became accustomed to her fairy tales, including the story of her descent from French nobility, although her ambitions to act on stage were briefly fulfilled.

When she has an affair with James Bellamy (Simon Williams), the son of the family, Sarah becomes pregnant, but her child dies minutes after birth. Her life changed with the arrival in the second series (1972–73) of driver Thomas Watkins, played by Collins’ husband, John Alderton. They quickly appeared as an on-screen couple and left at the end of the series.

Their characters were later spun off into the drama Thomas and Sarah (1979). Filming for the second series began but was abandoned due to a strike by ITV technicians.

By then, Alderton and Collins had appeared together on other programmes, as husband and wife – a struggling actor and the daughter of an absent-minded colleague – in the sitcom No Honesty (1974–75), and in various roles in the first two series of Wodehouse Playhouse (1975–76). Later, they starred in Forever Green (1989-92) as a city-dwelling couple who move to the countryside, with conservation issues and stories of badger rescue and alternative medicine.

Collins was born in Exmouth, Devon, the eldest of three daughters of Mary (née Callanan), known as Nora, and William Collins, both teachers. She was raised Roman Catholic in Wallasey, Cheshire, then London, where she was educated at Sacred Heart Abbey, Hammersmith. After training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, she worked as a teacher until she made her acting debut as Sabiha in A Gazelle in Park Lane at the Theater Royal, Windsor, in 1962.

The following year, Collins was an actor and assistant stage manager with the New Irish Players in Killarney. It was her first trip to Ireland, the birthplace of her maternal grandparents, where she fell in love with Tony Rohr, a member of the repertory company. When she returned home, she discovered that she was pregnant, but decided not to get married.

Her daughter, whom she named Louise, was born secretly at a mother and baby home in London run by nuns in 1964, when the Collins family thought she was acting on tour. Her decision to give up her child for adoption haunted Collins until 22 years later, Louise contacted her and they struck up a relationship.

Collins wrote movingly about pregnancy, childbirth, and the decision to adopt her daughter, in her 1992 book, A Letter to Louise. In the final chapters, she directly addresses her daughter with her thoughts from that time: “I was beaten, inadequate, soulless, and hopeless. I had nothing to offer you. I would give you up… I promise not a day would go by in my life without speaking your name and sending you a little bolt of love.”

Continuing her career, Collins made her stage debut in London as Lady Janet Wigton in The Passionflower Hotel (Prince of Wales Theatre, 1965-66). She began a string of West End roles, from Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest (Haymarket Theatre, 1968) and Brenda Cooper in The Night I Chased Women with Eels (Comedy Theatre, 1969) to Nancy Gray in The Happy Apple (Apollo Theatre, 1970) and Phoebe Craddock in the romantic comedy (Apollo, 1983).

On television, she played stubborn Samantha Briggs, whose brother has disappeared, in the 1967 Doctor Who story The Faceless Ones, then turned down an offer to become one of the Time Lord’s companions. After reviving the sci-fi show, she returned to it in 2006 as Queen Victoria in the adventure Tooth and Claw.

Collins’ other television parts included Dawn, the posh half of the two Liverpool flatmates – alongside Polly James as Beryl – in the first series (1969) of the sitcom The Liver Birds; Harriet Smith, British envoy to Ireland, at Ambassador (1998-99); and Sue, Sally Lindsay’s mother Lisa, in the first two outings of the comedy-drama Mount Pleasant (2011–12), with Bobby Ball as her husband.

Her first film role was a leading role as a dancer in the 1966 exploitation film Secrets of a Mill Girl. After Shirley Valentine began Collins’s career on the big screen, she had powerful roles as Joan Bethell, a feisty Irish nun who runs a clinic in poor Calcutta, in City of Joy (1992); Elsa Tabori, in a haunting performance as a Hungarian Jew fleeing the Nazis, in the Holocaust drama My Mother’s Courage (1995); A missionary among a group of female prisoners of war, he maintains his sanity by forming a choir in Heaven’s Way (1997).

Later, she played a former opera singer in a home for retired musicians in The Quartet (2012). However, starring with Joan Collins in 2017’s The Time of Their Lives was more a triumph of feel-good than drama or comedy. Collins was awarded an MBE in 2001.

She first met Alderton when he played Dr. Richard Moon in Emergency Ward 10, and was cast in a 1963 episode as Nurse Elliot. They married in 1970 after his divorce from Jill Brown, co-star of the TV series Hospital. He and their three children, Nicholas, Kate, Richard and Louise, survive her.