Copyright The New York Times
Pauline Collins, a British actress known for playing everywoman characters on television series like “Upstairs, Downstairs” and in films like “Shirley Valentine,” for which she earned an Oscar nomination, died on Wednesday in London. She was 85. Her family said the cause of her death, in a care facility, was Parkinson’s disease. Ms. Collins was already a veteran stage and TV actress when she was cast in “Shirley Valentine,” a one-woman play about a put-upon Liverpool housewife who discovers herself on a solo vacation to Greece. “I always said that I’d leave him when the kids grew up,” Shirley says, early in the script. “But by the time they’d grown up, there was nowhere to go.” It was a part Ms. Collins was practically born for: She grew up in a middle-class family in Wallasey, a suburban town across the River Mersey from Liverpool, and often said that had she not become an actress, she might have ended up like Shirley Valentine. She was better known in the late 1960s and early ’70s for parts on several popular British TV series, including “Doctor Who,” “The Liver Birds” and “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the popular show about the relationships between a wealthy family and its domestic staff. She played Sarah Moffat, a maid. While not exactly typecast, she often played a particularly British character: a bubbly yet resilient woman who faced down the corrosive effects of everyday modern life. She met her fellow actor John Alderton on the set of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” and the two married in 1969. They frequently appeared together, both on TV shows like “Thomas and Sarah,” a spinoff of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” and onstage in plays like “Going Straight.” They also starred in the 2002 film “Mrs. Caldicot’s Cabbage War.” In 2012 she joined a starry cast of veteran British actors, including Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Collins and Michael Gambon, in “Quartet,” about a group of musicians in a retirement home. The film was directed by Dustin Hoffman, who sought out Ms. Collins for the role — something she said she never expected. Pauline Collins was born on Sept. 3, 1940, in Exmouth, a town in southwest England where her parents, originally from Liverpool, had fled for safety from German air raids. After the bombings ended, they moved back, settling in Wallasey, where Pauline’s mother, Mary (Callanan) Collins, worked as a teacher and her father, William, was a schoolmaster. The family later relocated to London, where Ms. Collins studied theater at the Central (now Royal Central) School of Speech and Drama. She graduated in 1962 and spent several years as a substitute teacher while building her résumé as an actress. While touring with a theater company in Ireland, she began dating a fellow actor, Tony Rohr. She became pregnant, and in 1964 she gave birth to a daughter, Louise. She gave the baby up for adoption after six weeks and did not see her again until Louise was an adult. Ms. Collins recounted that story in her 1992 autobiography, “Letter to Louise.” By the late 1960s she was getting steady work on television. Her appearance in several episodes of the science fiction series “Doctor Who” led to an offer to appear in 39 more episodes, which could have made her career. She nevertheless declined. “I thought it was like a prison sentence,” she told The Guardian. “Maybe it would have given me a profile early in my career, but then I would have missed so many things.” Ms. Collins is survived by Mr. Alderton and their children, Nicholas, Kate and Richard; her daughter Louise; and several grandchildren. Though she appeared in 12 more films, including “City of Joy” (1992), starring Patrick Swayze, and “Albert Nobbs” (2011), starring Glenn Close, Ms. Collins was forever identified as Shirley Valentine, the role that made her famous. “Even last week a woman came up to me, and said, ‘I left my husband because of you, and it was the best thing I’ve ever done!’” she told The Daily Mirror in 2003. “It was no use my explaining it wasn’t because of me — it was because of the writer, Willy Russell.”
