SHE was one of Britain’s best loved actresses.
But Pauline Collins, who died yesterday at the age of 84, could have been an even bigger star if it wasn’t for her love of a fresh challenge.
She quit Upstairs Downstairs, where she played a bed-hopping maid, after two series.
Collins could have been one of Doctor Who’s first companions but the idea of a very long contract was her idea of purgatory.
Even after starring in the first series of the much loved sitcom The Liver Birds she quit for a new challenge.
She said: “I’m a bolter. I’m not giving up – it’s that I love change. I want to do different things.
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“I want something fresh. It offers you something new.
“With Doctor Who they offered me 39 episodes and I thought I would be trapped forever.”
To audiences world-wide she will be forever known as Shirley Valentine the downtrodden housewife who gave up her conventional life in the hope of something more.
After wowing audiences in London and then Broadway, producers were not sure on the little known actress starring in the big movie version.
Singer Cher, fresh from big hits The Witches of Eastwick and best actress Oscar for Moonstone, was eager for the part.
But the Liverpool lass won over Hollywood glamour.
She said: “They wanted Cher. She would have been tremendous.
“She wouldn’t have been Liverpool but they would have adapted it for her. I think she is terrific but I am really glad that Lewis Gilbert the director said ‘if it’s not done with Pauline then it won’t be done at all’.”
Six Hollywood bigshots were flown to London to see her perform the role and they immediately saw the director’s point.
Born on September 3, 1940, in Exmouth, Devon, she was raised in Wallasey, Cheshire, in a large extended Irish family who nearly all were teachers.
Collins went to school at the Sacred Heart High School before going on to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she qualified as a teacher. But she had set her heart on drama.
She said: “I trained as a teacher and I knew what it should be like from my mother and father and aunts and uncles who were all teachers. They believed it was a vocation and a life’s work and it was.
“When I did it, training half as a teacher and half as an actress, I did it well because I wasn’t afraid of it.
With Doctor Who they offered me 39 episodes and I thought I would be trapped forever
Pauline
“But I knew I wasn’t putting my heart into it. I had seen six hearts being go into teaching, I knew what it should be like.
“Teaching was a performance where you try to pretend you know more than the children. I did supply teaching mainly and I would be faced with a class requiring chemistry of which I knew zilch.
“So I used to get the cleverest child in the class to help me and give them the responsibility.”
While teaching paid the rent she was dedicated to life as an actress.
She said: “When I started performing, I decided that if in five years if I couldn’t earn as much money acting as I could as a teacher, it would be unrealistic for me to continue on the stage.”
Her professional acting debut came in 1962, on stage in Windsor, followed quickly by a part in London’s West End.
She appeared briefly in Britain’s first medical soap opera Emergency – Ward 10 and then the pilot episode and first series of The Liver Birds in 1969.
First big hit
But it was her portrayal of the ambitious parlourmaid Sarah Moffat in the hugely popular ITV drama series Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971 that made her a household name.
She once joked: “That was my first big hit. I was 30 then and it was the first thing that let people know I existed.
“She was a great character to play. She seduced all the gentlemen of the house.
“I seemed to spend all of my time either flat on my back or pregnant.”
It was there that she got to know her soon to be husband John Alderton who played the chauffeur. Their marriage in 1969 was one of the most enduring in showbusiness.
She said: “We met on Emergency – Ward 10. I was only doing one episode and he was the new star of it. We met properly a few years later when we did a play together but we didn’t start properly going out with each other until 1969.”
That was my first big hit. I was 30 then and it was the first thing that let people know I existed. She was a great character to play. She seduced all the gentlemen of the house
Pauline, on Upstairs, Downstairs
The pair worked together consistently throughout their careers.
She said: “We enjoy working together and we have done lots of stage plays together. We did call a moratorium on our partnership for nine years because we thought it was getting a bit twee.
“We don’t take work home with us, we can’t. Life has to go on at home. You put the kettle on, make food and forget about all that.”
When the stage adaptation of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine took off and went to New York in 1989, he was happy to put his career on hold and look after their three children Nicholas, Kate, and Richard.
‘An everywoman’
She said: “He has always been a good father. But he decided that as it was an important time for them as they were having exams he would stay home.
“John and I have never suffocated each other. It’s so important to give your partner freedom. We do miss each other when we’re separated, but we also enjoy each other’s freedom – I’m pleased that he’s doing something new and exciting, even if I’m staying at home.
“You need constant stimulus to keep a marriage alive. If you don’t have anything new to tell each other, or fresh points of view, you get stale.”
Playing Shirley won her a Tony, a Lawrence Olivier, a BAFTA and nominations for an Oscar and Golden Globe.
She said: “I know I am an everywoman. When people talk to me in the shops or on the bus I know they don’t think of me as a person they can’t approach. Because I am like them.
“People approach me and they tell me secrets. They say they have left their husbands.
“In America I get a lot of men saying I became a psychotherapist not a lawyer which my father wanted me to be.
“It’s about being brave and not doing what people think you should do.”
In a very personal act of bravery, in 1992 she published a book which revealed how as a 22-year-old actress working in Ireland she became pregnant and made the decision to gave up her daughter, Louise, for adoption, a secret she kept from her family and friends.
She said: “I had her adopted when she was six weeks old. It was the most awful thing ever to do.
People approach me and they tell me secrets
Pauline
“It’s extraordinary how you make these decisions in life. I thought my reasons for doing so were good
“They were partly familial because my parents were teachers at Catholic schools and partly because I had not a penny in the word and nothing to offer this child.
“It is extraordinary thinking about it now because it means so little now.
“I remember thinking one time if she was a boy it wasn’t so bad to be an illegitimate boy it was somehow more romantic.
“But it was tougher being an illegitimate girl because there would always people saying she will go the same way as her mother. For that reason I decided on adoption.
“It was awful, it broke my heart. It was like having a piece of your heart ripped out. I think it floors you for the rest of your life.”
But out of the blue her now 21-year-old daughter tracked her down and they were reunited.
She said: “I knew we would be reunited one day. I didn’t know when and I knew it would have to be at her instigation.
“I felt absolutely delighted when I opened her letter. I wasn’t surprised as three days before I had this extraordinary dream about her in which she was speaking to me so I knew it was coming. My three children were delighted.
“My daughter Kate once said she wished she had a sister and two weeks later she had one.”
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Pauline was given an OBE for services to drama in 2001 and last appeared on-screen in 2017 alongside old friend Joan Collins in The Time of Their Lives.
But the Hampstead home she shared with husband John was her oasis.
