Pauline Collins obit

Pauline Collins obituary: star of Shirley Valentine

Bafta-winning actress who took her famous character on a journey of self-discovery from stage to big screen dies aged 85

 

She was not on the list.

When Pauline Collins began reading the script of Willy Russell’s play Shirley Valentine, she thought to herself: “This is a long speech.”

As she read on, it slowly dawned that there were no other characters and that the entire play was one long monologue by Russell’s eponymous middle-aged Liverpool housewife, who wonders where her youth went and heads for Greece on a voyage of self-discovery, leaving a note for her family on a cupboard door and turning her back on her humdrum former existence for ever.

A one-handed play is the most daunting challenge any actress can take up and as she read the script, Collins realised that if she took the part, it would keep her on stage alone for more than two hours with only one brief interval. Yet she had no hesitation in accepting. “I loved it because I knew every character in it because that’s where I’m from — Wallasey, the opposite side of the Mersey,” she said. “All the voices were in my head the minute I read it.”

Directed by Simon Callow, she opened in the play at the Vaudeville Theatre in London’s West End to rave reviews in January 1988 and won the Laurence Olivier award for best actress. A year later she repeated the role on Broadway and won a Tony award.

Paramount bought the film rights and employed Russell to adapt Shirley’s monologue for a full cast — then came up with the idea that they wanted Cher to play Shirley. However, Lewis Gilbert, the film’s director, was adamant and told the studio he would not make the film unless Collins starred in it. To persuade them, he arranged for five senior Paramount executives to see her on stage in New York. “That’s a little bit of pressure, right there,” Collins noted of what was the biggest audition of her life.

Needless to say, they were won over by her bravura performance and recognised what everyone else who had seen her on stage already knew: she was not merely some actress putting on the motley to play a part. To all intents and purposes, she was Shirley Valentine.

The film, which made good use of romantic Greek locations and also starred Tom Conti and Joanna Lumley, struck a universal chord. “I have allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more and it’s all gone unused,” Collins’s character remarked — and a million housewives knew exactly what she meant. “Why do we get all this life if we don’t ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings and dreams and hopes if we don’t ever use them?”

Her performance won more awards, including a Bafta, plus Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. After a successful cinema run, when it was aired as the BBC’s main Christmas night attraction in 1992, Shirley Valentine drew more viewers than the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.

Curiously, not much followed in the way of further blockbusters. Collins was offered parts but most of them required her to be Shirley Valentine all over again under a different name and she was not interested in repeating herself.

With three children to bring up, she took a conscious decision to put her family before the enticements of Hollywood. It meant working predominantly in British television, often playing opposite her husband John Alderton, in series such as the ITV eco-drama Forever Green, in which they played a couple who leave London for the country and discover the pitfalls of rural life.

The desire to keep her family close was further evident when she and Alderton co-starred on stage with their daughter Kate Alderton in Going Straight at London’s Richmond Theatre in 2004.

A modest and unstarry actress who “never sold myself on youth or beauty”, her forte was middlebrow television and she had a natural comedic touch. “People have a hard time taking people with round faces seriously,” she once said. She never played Shakespeare or seemed to have any wish to do so.

However, she was a splendid Miss Flite in the BBC’s 2005 television adaptation of Dickens’ Bleak House and a decade later made a memorable Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit in Tony Jordan’s inventive cavalcade Dickensian, appearing in every episode of the 20-part BBC series.

She is survived by her husband, whom she married in 1969; their children Nicholas, Kate and Richard; and by an older daughter, Louise, whom she gave up for adoption in 1964. When she discovered that she was pregnant she had already split up with the child’s father, the actor Tony Rohr, and felt unable to cope as a single mother.

When Louise was 21, she tracked down her mother and they were reunited. It led in 1992 to Collins publishing a book, Letter to Louise, a moving account of her own childhood and early adulthood leading up to the adoption.

“I remember the last time I saw you,” she wrote of the moment when she handed over her daughter. “Every day of my life I’ve relived that moment, replayed each second like a book of flicker pictures, clinging frame by frame to the last images of you. Now I cannot understand why I did that terrible thing, why I didn’t look harder for another solution.”

Pauline Collins was born in 1940 in Exmouth, Devon, but grew up in Wallasey, Cheshire, the daughter of Mary Honora (née Callanan), a teacher, and William Henry Collins, a headmaster. Both her parents were of Irish extraction and she was brought up as a Roman Catholic and educated at the Sacred Heart convent school in Hammersmith.

At school she was taunted for being posh — somewhat ironic given that in later life she so often played memorably down-to-earth working-class characters — and considered applying to Oxbridge, but got the acting bug and opted instead for the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

She made her first professional stage appearance at Windsor’s Theatre Royal in 1962 and her television debut the following year as a nurse in the medical soap Emergency Ward 10. Between jobs she worked as a supply teacher and there was a fair bit of time spent at the blackboard, for her career was slow to take off. She was 26 before her first film appearance, as a stripper in Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966), and her West End stage debut came that same year in the musical Passion Flower Hotel.

In 1967 she appeared in five episodes of Doctor Who and was offered further series as a companion to Patrick Troughton’s Time Lord but turned it down. She eventually returned to the show in a single episode in 2006, playing Queen Victoria opposite David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor.

She excelled in the first series of The Liver Birds as Polly James’s flatmate in Carla Lane’s Liverpudlian comedy, but again gave it up and was replaced by Nerys Hughes. “We have always been movers-on,” she explained. “Everybody has to do a series now and stay on for ten years, or whatever. But we liked to change after doing one or two.”

What really put her on the map was her portrayal of Sarah Moffat, the parlourmaid in ITV’s early 1970s drama Upstairs, Downstairs. Alderton, to whom she was by now married, was also in the cast as the chauffeur Thomas Watkins and they subsequently reprised their characters in the less successful spin-off series Thomas and Sarah.

She also starred with her husband as a couple recalling in flashback their courtship and early married life in the sit-com No, Honestly and the pair played a range of characters in Wodehouse Playhouse, based on short stories by the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.

That she could handle darker parts too was evident when she played an alcoholic nurse in ITV’s 1985 adaptation of PD James’s The Black Tower and her post-Shirley Valentine films also tended to cast her in more sombre roles. In City of Joy (1992) she supported Patrick Swayze’s American doctor helping the poor in India, while in My Mother’s Courage (1995) she played a Jewish mother being sent to Auschwitz. In Paradise Road (1997) she was a missionary held prisoner by the Japanese, joining a cast that included Glenn Close and Cate Blanchett.

However, there were limits to the extent to which Collins was prepared to suffer for her art and she refused a role in a film about the serial killer Dennis Nilsen. “It’s bad for the spirit to do stuff like that,” she said.

To her surprise, in 2011 she received a call from Dustin Hoffman inviting her to appear in Quartet, his debut as a director. They had never met but Maggie Smith and Tom Courtenay, who had already been cast in the film based on Ronald Harwood’s play, recommended Collins and Hoffman offered her the part of Cissy, a former opera singer with dementia living in a home for retired musicians, on the strength of a two-hour phone call. She rewarded his faith with a poignant yet vibrant performance.

She bowed out by co-starring with her unrelated namesake Joan Collins in The Time of Their Lives (2017). With Joan playing a faded movie star and Pauline a timid housewife, the plot involved the pair escaping from a retirement home and embarking on a life-changing road trip that improbably bonds them together. The film was panned by critics for its sentimentality yet, as a silver-haired take on Thelma & Louise, it made for a gently charming swansong.

Filmography

Film

Year     Title     Role     Notes

1966    Secrets of a Windmill Girl      Pat Lord         

1989    Shirley Valentine         Shirley Valentine-Bradshaw   

1992    City of Joy      Joan Bethel     

1995    My Mother's Courage Elsa Tabori     

1997    Paradise Road Daisy 'Margaret' Drummond 

2000    One Life Stand            Karaoke Crowd          

2002    Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War  Thelma Caldicot         

2009    From Time to Time     Mrs. Tweedie 

2010    You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger   Cristal 

2011    Albert Nobbs  Margaret 'Madge' Baker        

2012    Quartet            Cissy Robson 

2015    Dough Joanna

2017    The Time of Their Lives         Priscilla           

Byrd and the Bees       Beatrice          

Television

Year     Title     Role     Notes

1963    Emergency – Ward 10 Nurse Elliott    1 episode

1966    The Marriage Lines    Jean     Episode: "Big Business"

Pardon the Expression            Miss Wainwright / Val 3 episodes

The Corridor People   Syrie's maid     Episode: "Victim as Black"

Theatre 625     Clara    Episode: "Amerika"

The Saint         Marie-Therese Episode: "The Better Mousetrap"

Blackmail        Freida Straker  Episode: "Please Do Not Disturb"

The Three Musketeers Kitty    2 episodes

The Making of Jericho                        TV film

1967    The Avengers  Miss Peadbody (voice, uncredited)[13]          Episode: "Dead Man's Treasure"

Doctor Who    Samantha Briggs         Serial: "The Faceless Ones"

Softly, Softly   Marilyn            Episode: "Somebody Important"

1968    B and B           Chantal            Episode: "No Son of Mine"

Armchair Theatre        Betty / Mary Murtagh 2 episodes

1969    The Old Campaigner   Winnie Haldane          Episode: "French Farce"

Comedy Playhouse     Dawn / Marjorie          2 episodes

The Liver Birds           Dawn  5 episodes

The Wednesday Play   Angelina / Joan Percival         2 episodes

Parkin's Patch  Doreen Ashworth        Episode: "A Pair of Good Shoes"

1970    The Mating Machine   Elizabeth         Episode: "Who Sleeps on the Right?"

1972    Thirty-Minute Theatre            The Girl           Episode: "King's Cross Lunch Hour"

Country Matters          Ruby   Episode: "Crippled Bloom"

1971–1973      Upstairs, Downstairs   Sarah Moffat   13 episodes

1973    Armchair 30    Carol   Episode: "Carol's Story"

1974    No, Honestly   Clara Burrell-Danby   13 episodes

1975    BBC Play of the Month          Lady Teazle     Episode: "The School for Scandal"

1975–1976      Wodehouse Playhouse            various characters        13 episodes

1979    Thomas & Sarah         Sarah Moffat

Play for Today Eileen  Episode: "Long Distance Information"

1980    Tales of the Unexpected         Pat Lewis        Episode: "A Girl Can't Always Have Everything"

1983    Little Misses and the Mr. Men            Narrator, various female characters    TV series

1984    Knockback      Sylvia  TV movie

1985    Tropical Moon Over Dorking Myra

The Black Tower        Maggie Hewson          5 episodes

1988    Tales of the Unexpected         Eve Peregrine  Episode: "The Colonel's Lady"

1989–1992      Forever Green Harriet Boult   18 episodes

1996    Flowers of the Forest  Aileen Matthews         TV movie

1998–1999      The Ambassador         Harriet Smith   13 Episodes

2000    Little Grey Rabbit                   TV series

2002    Man and Boy  Betty Silver     TV movie

2003    Sparkling Cyanide      Dr. Catherine Kendall

2005    Bleak House    Miss Flite        10 episodes

2006    Doctor Who    Queen Victoria            Episode: "Tooth and Claw"

What We Did on Our Holiday Lil Taylor        TV movie

2010    Agatha Christie's Marple        Thyrza Grey    Episode: "The Pale Horse"

Merlin  Alice    Episode: "Love in the Time of Dragons"

2011–2012      Mount Pleasant           Sue      14 episodes

2015–2016      Dickensian      Mrs Gamp       20 episodes

Theatre

Year     Title     Role     Notes

1962    A Gazelle in Park Lane           Sabiha, an Arab maid-servant Theatre Royal, Windsor

1966    Passion Flower Hotel  Lady Janet Wigton      Prince of Wales Theatre

1968    The Importance of Being Earnest       Cecily Cardew Theatre Royal, Haymarket

1969    The Night I Chased the Women with an Eel  Brenda Cooper            Comedy Theatre, London, Chester Gateway Theatre, and other locations

1970    The Happy Apple        Nancy Gray     Apollo Theatre, Theatre Royal, Brighton, and other locations

Come As You Are                   New Theatre, London and Strand Theatre, London

1974    Judies  Judy     Comedy Theatre

1975    Engaged          Minnie Symperson      The Old Vic, London

1975–1976      Confusions                  Theatre Royal, Bath

1976–1977      Lucy / Paula / Polly / Milly / Beryl    Apollo Theatre

1980–1981      Rattle of a Simple Man           Cyrenne           Savoy Theatre, Theatre Royal, Windsor, and other locations

1983    Romantic Comedy      Phoebe Craddock        Apollo Theatre

1986–1987      Woman in Mind          Susan (replacement)    Vaudeville Theatre and Richmond Theatre

1988    Shirley Valentine         Shirley Valentine         Vaudeville Theatre

1992    Shades Pearl    Albery Theatre, Richmond Theatre, London, and other locations

2007–2008      Cinderella        Fairy Godmother         The Old Vic, London