PAULINE COLLINS

(3 September 1940 – 5 November 2025)

If for nothing else, Pauline Collins, who has died at the age of 85 from the results of Parkinson’s disease, will be remembered for her virtuoso performance in the title role of Shirley Valentine. The original one-woman play depicted a bored Liverpool housewife who feared that life was passing her by as she cooked for her uncommunicative husband with only the kitchen wall to talk to. When a friend wins a competition for a holiday in Greece, she goes off, just leaving a note behind her. Willy Russell wrote his play in 1986 for the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool where Noreen Kershaw played the role. Two years on the play reached London with Collins and with Simon Callow as director. I interviewed her then and she seemed to take on the role of Shirley Valentine with enormous ease and equanimity and proved to be ideal casting. It had a long run and won an Olivier for best new comedy, with Collins getting the best actress award. The success was repeated on Broadway with another long run and several trophies and nominations. The film version, for which Russell wrote the screenplay, had American backers who would have preferred an American star but Russell insisted on Collins and she really was the only viable choice, winning a Bafta for best actress and an Oscar nomination.

Pauline Collins was born in Exmouth in Devon, the daughter of schoolteachers, and brought up in Wallasey in Cheshire. She was educated at the Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith and then acquired a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama. She met her future husband John Alderton in the ITV soap Emergency Ward 10 (1960) and was in the first episode of The Liver Birds sitcom. Her first major TV role was as the maid Sarah in the period series Upstairs, Downstairs. John Alderton also joined the cast and later they did a spin-off series, Thomas and Sarah, as well as the series Forever Green.

Collins’ first film was Secrets of a Windmill Girl in 1966, a cheapo exploitationer, after which she starred opposite Patrick Swayze in Roland Joffé’s City of Joy (1992), followed by Paradise Road (1997) with Glenn Close, Cate Blanchett, Julianna Margulies and Frances McDormand, Bruce Beresford’s drama about women of various nationalities imprisoned by the Japanese in Sumatra. John Alderton joined his wife for Mrs Caldicott’s Cabbage War (2002) about a woman forced to move to a nursing home. From Time to Time (2009) was a fantasy about a missing child in WWII, with Maggie Smith and Timothy Spall, followed by Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), a comedy-drama about uneasy relationships with Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins. In 2012 she appeared alongside Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Michael Gambon in Quartet, marking Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut, a delightful comedy-drama in which Pauline Collins played a former opera singer. One of her last films was the British road movie The Time of Their Lives (2017) in which the two Collins girls, Pauline and Joan, have exactly what it says in the title.

Pauline Collins and John Alderton married in 1969 and had three children, Kate, Nicholas and Richard. Pauline also had a daughter with the actor Tony Rohr in 1964 but, because of her circumstances then, she gave her up for adoption, They were reunited 21 years later and the actress published a memoir for her daughter called Letter to Louise.

MICHAEL DARVELL