Pauline Collins (Wikipedia entry)
Pauline Collins is an English actress of stage, television, and film, who first came to prominence portraying Sarah Moffat in Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–73) and its spin-off, Thomas & Sarah (1979). In 1992, she released her autobiography, titled Letter to Louise.
Collins played the title role in the play Shirley Valentine, for which she won an Olivier Award in 1988, and Drama Desk and Tony Awards in 1989. She reprised the role in the 1989 film adaptation, winning the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and receiving Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. She also starred in the television dramas Forever Green (1989–92) and The Ambassador (1998–99). Her other film appearances include City of Joy (1992), Paradise Road (1997), Albert Nobbs (2011), Quartet (2012), and The Time of Their Lives (2017).
Collins was born in Exmouth, Devon, the daughter of Mary Honora (née Callanan), a schoolteacher, and William Henry Collins, a school headmaster.[2] She is of Irish extraction, and was brought up as a Roman Catholic in Wallasey near Liverpool.[3] Her great-uncle was Irish poet Jeremiah Joseph Callanan.[4]
Collins was educated at Sacred Heart High School.[5] and studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Before turning to acting, she worked as a teacher until 1962. She made her stage debut at Windsor in A Gazelle in Park Lane in 1962 and her West Enddebut in Passion Flower Hotel in 1965. During the play’s run, she made her first film, Secrets of a Windmill Girl, released in 1966. More stage roles followed.
Collins played Samantha Briggs in the 1967 Doctor Who serial The Faceless Ones and was offered the chance to continue in the series as a new companion for the Doctor, but declined the invitation.
Other early TV credits include the UK’s first medical soap Emergency – Ward 10 (1960), and the pilot episode and first series of The Liver Birds, both in 1969.
Collins first became well known for her role as the maid Sarah in the 1970s ITV drama series Upstairs, Downstairs. The character appeared regularly throughout the first two series, the second of which also starred her actor husband, John Alderton, with whom she later starred in a spin-off, Thomas & Sarah (1979), and the sitcom No, Honestly written by Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham, as well as in a series of short story adaptations called Wodehouse Playhouse (1975–78). She co-narrated the animated British children’s TV series Little Miss with husband John Alderton in 1983.
In connection with her Upstairs, Downstairs role, Collins recorded a 1973 single for Decca: What Are We Going to Do with Uncle Arthur?(performed by her character several times during the series) b/w With Every Passing Day (a vocal version of the show’s theme).[6]
She was a subject of the television programme This Is Your Life in April 1972 when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews.
In 1988, Collins starred in the one-woman play Shirley Valentine in London, reprising the role on Broadway in 1989 and in the 1989 filmversion. The film won a number of awards and nominations. Both the play and the feature film utilized the technique known as “breaking the fourth wall,” as the character Shirley Valentine directly addresses the audience throughout the story.
After Shirley Valentine, Collins again starred alongside her husband in the popular ITV drama series Forever Green created and written by Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham in which the fictitious couple escape the city with their children to start a new life in the country. It ran from 1989 to 1992 over 18 episodes. Collins was voted sexiest woman in Britain in 1990.
Collins’ film credits include 1992’s City of Joy, 1995’s My Mother’s Courage, 1997’s Paradise Road, and 2002’s Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War, which also featured Alderton. In 1999 and 2000, Collins starred as Harriet Smith in the BBC television drama Ambassador, where she played the lead role of the British ambassador to Ireland. Other television credits include The Saint, The Wednesday Play, Armchair Theatre, Play for Today, Tales of the Unexpected, Country Matters and The Black Tower.
In 2002, she guest starred in Man and Boy, the dramatisation of Tony Parsons‘ best-seller. In 2005 she appeared as Miss Flite in the BBC production of Charles Dickens‘ Bleak House.
In 2006, she became only the third actor to have been in both the original and new series of Doctor Who, appearing in the episode “Tooth and Claw” as Queen Victoria.
Later in 2006, she appeared in Extinct, a programme where eight celebrities campaigned on behalf of an animal to save it from extinction. Collins campaigned to save the Bengal tiger and won the public vote.
In December 2007, she appeared as the fairy godmother in the pantomime Cinderella at the Old Vic in London.
In 2011, she was cast as part of Sky 1‘s new comedy-drama Mount Pleasant. She played the role of Sue, Lisa’s mum, in the first two series running into 2012. She didn’t return to the third series in 2013, and her character was killed off in the fourth series in 2014.
In late 2015, she appeared as Mrs Gamp in the BBC TV series Dickensian.
Collins was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2001 Birthday Honours for services to drama.[7]
Guardian obituary in 2025.
The actor Pauline Collins, who has died aged 85 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had a habit of moving from one role to another but will for ever be remembered for two parts – a parlourmaid in the 1970s masters-and-servants TV drama Upstairs Downstairs, at the mercy of her employers, and a woman very much in control of her own life in Willy Russell’s stage and film comedy Shirley Valentine.
“Too much security makes me nervous, afraid of missing all the surprises just below the horizon,” she once remarked. “One of the terrors of a little success is the possibility of losing the ability to dare, to jump off the cliff.”
The biggest spotlight shone on Collins when she starred as the bored Liverpool housewife in both the original West End and Broadway productions of Shirley Valentine, with Simon Callow directing. She first performed the one-woman show at the Vaudeville theatre, London, in 1988, holding audiences in thrall for two hours with a warm, funny monologue about Shirley escaping from her humdrum life cooking egg and chips for her unappreciative husband and “talking to the wall” by travelling to Greece and finding romance with a taverna owner
Although the Guardian’s critic felt that the first two acts were essentially “dial-a-joke humour”, the review praised Collins’s comic timing before, in the final act, giving “the sense of a real woman, all stretch-mark and lobster-pink tan, acknowledging 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 of the previous year.
When the story was fleshed out into a movie, with Bernard Hill as Shirley’s husband and Tom Conti as her lover, Collins found film fame, although only after Russell loyally held out for her to star while the Hollywood studio Paramount wanted an established American screen actor. She won a Bafta best actress award and was nominated for an Oscar
Her career had until then been confined to stage and television. She was at the heart of the story when Upstairs Downstairs began in 1971, with her character, Sarah Moffat, landing a job as parlourmaid in the Bellamy household at 165 Eaton Place, in the fashionable Belgravia district of London. The understairs staff soon become used to her fanciful tales, including that of being descended from French nobility, although her ambitions to act on stage are briefly fulfilled.
When she has an affair with James Bellamy (Simon Williams), the son of the household, Sarah becomes pregnant, but her baby boy dies minutes after birth. Her life changes with the arrival, in the second series (1972-73), of the chauffeur Thomas Watkins, played by Collins’s husband, John Alderton. They were soon a couple on screen and left at the end of the series.
Their characters were later spun off into the drama Thomas & Sarah (1979). Filming started on a second series but was abandoned because of an ITV technicians’ strike.
Alderton and Collins had by then featured together in other programmes, as a husband and wife – the struggling actor and the daughter of an absent-minded peer – in the sitcom No, Honestly (1974-75), and in various roles for the first two series of Wodehouse Playhouse (1975-76). Later, they starred in Forever Green (1989-92) as a townie couple moving to the countryside, with conservationist issues and stories of badger-saving and alternative
Collins was born in Exmouth, Devon, the eldest of three daughters of Mary (nee Callanan), known as Nora, and William Collins, both teachers. She was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith in Wallasey, Cheshire, then London, where she was educated at the Convent of Sacred Heart, Hammersmith. After training at Central School of Speech and Drama, she worked as a teacher until making her professional acting debut as Sabiha in A Gazelle in Park Lane at the Theatre 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. On returning home she discovered she was pregnant, but decided against marriage.
Her daughter, whom she named Louise, was born secretly in a London mother-and-baby home run by nuns in 1964, when Collins’s family believed her to be acting on tour. Her decision to give her child away for adoption haunted Collins until, 22 years later, Louise contacted her and they established a relationship.
Collins wrote movingly about the pregnancy, birth and decision to have her daughter adopted, in her 1992 book, Letter to Louise. In the final chapters, she addressed her daughter directly with her thoughts from the time: “I was beaten, inadequate, spiritless, hopeless. I had nothing to give you. I would give you away … I promise you that not a day will go by of my life that I do not speak your name and send a little bolt of love to you.”
Moving on with her career, Collins made her London stage debut as Lady Janet Wigton in Passion Flower Hotel (Prince of Wales theatre, 1965-66). It 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 the Women With an Eel (Comedy theatre, 1969) to Nancy Gray in The Happy Apple (Apollo theatre, 1970) and Phoebe Craddock in Romantic Comedy (Apollo, 1983).
On television, she played the headstrong Samantha Briggs, whose brother goes missing, in the 1967 Doctor Who story The Faceless Ones, then turned down an offer to become one of the Time Lord’s companions. Following the sci-fi programme’s revival, she returned to it in 2006 as Queen Victoria in the Tooth and Claw adventure
Collins’s other TV parts included Dawn, the posher half of the two Liverpool flatmates – alongside Polly James as Beryl – in the first series (1969) of the sitcom The Liver Birds; Harriet Smith, Britain’s envoy to Ireland, in The Ambassador (1998-99); and Sue, mother of Sally Lindsay’s Lisa, in the first two runs of the comedy-drama Mount Pleasant (2011-12), with Bobby Ball as her husband.
Her first film role was a leading one as a dancer in the 1966 exploitation movie Secrets of a Windmill Girl. After Shirley Valentine kickstarted Collins’s big-screen career, she had powerful roles as Joan Bethel, a feisty Irish nun running a clinic in poverty-stricken Calcutta, in City of Joy (1992); Elsa Tabori, in a haunting performance as a Hungarian Jew escaping the Nazis, in the Holocaust drama My Mother’s Courage (1995); and a missionary among a group of female prisoners of war, keeping sane by forming a choir in Paradise Road (1997).
Later, she played a former opera singer in a home for retired musicians in Quartet (2012). However, starring with Joan Collins in the 2017 road movie The Time of Their Lives was more of a triumph of feelgood than drama or comedy. Collins was made OBE in 2001.
She first met Alderton when he played Dr Richard Moone in Emergency Ward 10, and she was cast in a 1963 episode as Nurse Elliott. They married in 1970 following his divorce from Jill Browne, his co-star in the TV hospital soap. He, their three children, Nicholas, Kate and Richard, and Louise survive her.