Copyright The Boston Globe
“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. The play, written by Willy Russell, premiered in Liverpool in 1986. Two years later it opened on London’s West End to enthusiastic reviews. In 1989 it moved to Broadway. Ms. Collins practically swept the theater honors that year on both sides of the Atlantic, winning the Olivier, Tony, Drama Desk, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle awards for best actress in a play. She reprised her role in the film version, also released in 1989, with a cast that was expanded from one character to several, including Tom Conti as her Greek lover. Again, the acclaim poured in: She won the British Academy Film Award, or BAFTA, for best actress and was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. Aside from an early, forgettable sexploitation flick -- “Secrets of a Windmill Girl” (1966) -- “Shirley Valentine” was Ms. Collins’s first film role. 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 Connolly 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. “Surprises,” she told The Guardian in 2012. “That’s what I love about this business. Even at my age, you can get surprises.” 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 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.”
