Pauline Collins, who has died in London at the age of 85, was among the craftiest actors of her generation. She was also an undeniable comfort.
The public felt they were watching a friend on screen, but, in her most celebrated performances, there was always a sense of sly intelligence winking within. It was there in her breakthrough turn as Sarah Moffat, incorrigible underhouse parlour maid, in the stratospherically successful ITV series Upstairs Downstairs.
You caught that same buried wit during her lonely monologues in the film version of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine from 1989. When that performance secured her an unexpected Academy Award nomination, fans of her British television performances – often appearing alongside husband John Alderton – could be forgiven for fearing the United States would capture her and eat her alive.
But that was never likely. Collins did not seem interested in pale retreads of the plucky Liverpool housewife who brought her to the Oscars. She and Alderton treasured their restlessness.
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“I tell you what, we have always been movers on,” she told the Guardian in 2012. “Everybody has to do a series now and stay on for 10 years or whatever. But both of us liked to change after doing one or two.”
Born in Devon to an Irish Catholic family, she was raised in Liverpool – mum and dad were both teachers – before studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. After a spell in her parents’ profession, she made her way, in 1963, to the New Irish Players in Killarney.
During that period, she became pregnant by the Irish actor Tony Rohr and, though she felt her parents would have been supportive, gave the baby up for adoption. Twenty-one years later, the child, Louise, contacted the now-successful actor and they formed a relationship.
“I cannot understand why I did that terrible thing, why I didn’t look harder for another solution,” Collins later wrote in a memoir titled Letter to Louise.
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She reasonably argued that she “couldn’t have brought her up on £8 10s a week”. As it happened, Collins was soon doing better than that. She appeared as Samantha Briggs in a 1967 episode of Doctor Who but turned down the offer to play a regular companion.
“Maybe it would have given me a profile early in my career, but then I would have missed so many things,” she said.
Proper fame came with the role of Sarah – clever, sneaky, charming – in Upstairs Downstairs from 1971. It is hard now to convey the popularity of that series concerning the doings of an upper middle-class family and their servants in early 20th century Belgravia.
The debt owed by the (more forelock-tugging) Downton Abbey was acknowledged when the later series based its first film outing around a visit by King George V to the titular pile. The most famous episode of Upstairs Downstairs had Sarah, pregnant by James Bellamy, the family’s errant oldest son, giving birth noisily in the servants’ quarters while Edward VII guzzled his dinner above stairs.
One suspects Collins did not want much to change
Once again, Collins elected not to get tied down. After two series, she and Alderton, who played Thomas, the slippery chauffeur, departed Upstairs Downstairs to become darlings of British comedy. Married in 1969, they were charming in the sitcom No, Honestly and the period comedy Wodehouse Playhouse.
Their status as a national institution was confirmed when they appeared in a series of Maxwell House coffee commercials as variations on themselves.
Had Shirley Valentine not come along the story could have progressed with few further jolts. Both she and her husband, a lanky East Midlander with an endlessly endearing manner, would always have found welcome on stage and (usually small) screen. She took on the role of Shirley, misused wife to an oblivious loser, when the one-woman show moved from the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool to London’s West End.
Lewis Gilbert’s film version opened up the play and took Shirley to Greece where, hilariously self-aware, she got it on with Tom Conti’s tavern owner.
The film was a critical hit, but Collins’s Oscar nomination in 1990 was still something of a surprise. That was the year Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor and Brenda Fricker won best supporting actress for My Left Foot.
Collins found herself up against such glamorous stars as Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and Isabelle Adjani in best actress, but lost to Jessica Tandy for Driving Miss Daisy.
Nothing much changed. One suspects Collins did not want much to change. She continued to bring her subtle intelligence to tricky roles on film and television. Back with Alderton in the ITV drama Forever Green.
Beside Patrick Swayze in Roland Joffé’s 1992 film City of Joy. Miss Flite in the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Back to Doctor Who in 2006, after close to 40 years, as Queen Victoria in an episode titled Tooth and Claw.
Collins died “peacefully” after several years living with Parkinson’s disease.
“She will always be remembered for Shirley Valentine,” John Alderton remarked. “But her greatest performance was as my wife and mother to our beautiful children.”
She is survived by her three children with Alderton and by Louise.
