The actor Pauline Collins, who has died aged 85 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had a habit of moving from one role to another but will for ever be remembered for two parts – a parlourmaid in the 1970s masters-and-servants TV drama Upstairs Downstairs, at the mercy of her employers, and a woman very much in control of her own life in Willy Russell’s stage and film comedy Shirley Valentine.
“Too much security makes me nervous, afraid of missing all the surprises just below the horizon,” she once remarked. “One of the terrors of a little success is the possibility of losing the ability to dare, to jump off the cliff.”
The biggest spotlight shone on Collins when she starred as the bored Liverpool housewife in both the original West End and Broadway productions of Shirley Valentine, with Simon Callow directing. She first performed the one-woman show at the Vaudeville theatre, London, in 1988, holding audiences in thrall for two hours with a warm, funny monologue about Shirley escaping from her humdrum life cooking egg and chips for her unappreciative husband and “talking to the wall” by travelling to Greece and finding romance with a taverna owner.
Although the Guardian’s critic felt that the first two acts were essentially “dial-a-joke humour”, the review praised Collins’s comic timing before, in the final act, giving “the sense of a real woman, all stretch-mark and lobster-pink tan, acknowledging she is full of unused life”. In 1989 the production ran for 10 months at the Booth theatre, New York, and Collins won a Tony award for her performance to add to her Olivier award of the previous year.
When the story was fleshed out into a movie, with Bernard Hill as Shirley’s husband and Tom Conti as her lover, Collins found film fame, although only after Russell loyally held out for her to star while the Hollywood studio Paramount wanted an established American screen actor. She won a Bafta best actress award and was nominated for an Oscar.
Her career had until then been confined to stage and television. She was at the heart of the story when Upstairs Downstairs began in 1971, with her character, Sarah Moffat, landing a job as parlourmaid in the Bellamy household at 165 Eaton Place, in the fashionable Belgravia district of London. The understairs staff soon become used to her fanciful tales, including that of being descended from French nobility, although her ambitions to act on stage are briefly fulfilled.
When she has an affair with James Bellamy (Simon Williams), the son of the household, Sarah becomes pregnant, but her baby boy dies minutes after birth. Her life changes with the arrival, in the second series (1972-73), of the chauffeur Thomas Watkins, played by Collins’s husband, John Alderton. They were soon a couple on screen and left at the end of the series.
Their characters were later spun off into the drama Thomas & Sarah (1979). Filming started on a second series but was abandoned because of an ITV technicians’ strike.
Alderton and Collins had by then featured together in other programmes, as a husband and wife – the struggling actor and the daughter of an absent-minded peer – in the sitcom No, Honestly (1974-75), and in various roles for the first two series of Wodehouse Playhouse (1975-76). Later, they starred in Forever Green (1989-92) as a townie couple moving to the countryside, with conservationist issues and stories of badger-saving and alternative medicine.
Collins was born in Exmouth, Devon, the eldest of three daughters of Mary (nee Callanan), known as Nora, and William Collins, both teachers. She was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith in Wallasey, Cheshire, then London, where she was educated at the Convent of Sacred Heart, Hammersmith. After training at Central School of Speech and Drama, she worked as a teacher until making her professional acting debut as Sabiha in A Gazelle in Park Lane at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in 1962.
The following year, Collins was an actor and assistant stage manager with the New Irish Players in Killarney. It was her first trip to Ireland, the birthplace of her maternal grandparents, where she fell in love with Tony Rohr, a member of the repertory company. On returning home she discovered she was pregnant, but decided against marriage.
Her daughter, whom she named Louise, was born secretly in a London mother-and-baby home run by nuns in 1964, when Collins’s family believed her to be acting on tour. Her decision to give her child away for adoption haunted Collins until, 22 years later, Louise contacted her and they established a relationship.
Collins wrote movingly about the pregnancy, birth and decision to have her daughter adopted, in her 1992 book, Letter to Louise. In the final chapters, she addressed her daughter directly with her thoughts from the time: “I was beaten, inadequate, spiritless, hopeless. I had nothing to give you. I would give you away … I promise you that not a day will go by of my life that I do not speak your name and send a little bolt of love to you.”
Moving on with her career, Collins made her London stage debut as Lady Janet Wigton in Passion Flower Hotel (Prince of Wales theatre, 1965-66). It began a string of West End roles, from Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest (Haymarket theatre, 1968) and Brenda Cooper in The Night I Chased the Women With an Eel (Comedy theatre, 1969) to Nancy Gray in The Happy Apple (Apollo theatre, 1970) and Phoebe Craddock in Romantic Comedy (Apollo, 1983).
On television, she played the headstrong Samantha Briggs, whose brother goes missing, in the 1967 Doctor Who story The Faceless Ones, then turned down an offer to become one of the Time Lord’s companions. Following the sci-fi programme’s revival, she returned to it in 2006 as Queen Victoria in the Tooth and Claw adventure.
Collins’s other TV parts included Dawn, the posher half of the two Liverpool flatmates – alongside Polly James as Beryl – in the first series (1969) of the sitcom The Liver Birds; Harriet Smith, Britain’s envoy to Ireland, in The Ambassador (1998-99); and Sue, mother of Sally Lindsay’s Lisa, in the first two runs of the comedy-drama Mount Pleasant (2011-12), with Bobby Ball as her husband.
Her first film role was a leading one as a dancer in the 1966 exploitation movie Secrets of a Windmill Girl. After Shirley Valentine kickstarted Collins’s big-screen career, she had powerful roles as Joan Bethel, a feisty Irish nun running a clinic in poverty-stricken Calcutta, in City of Joy (1992); Elsa Tabori, in a haunting performance as a Hungarian Jew escaping the Nazis, in the Holocaust drama My Mother’s Courage (1995); and a missionary among a group of female prisoners of war, keeping sane by forming a choir in Paradise Road (1997).
Later, she played a former opera singer in a home for retired musicians in Quartet (2012). However, starring with Joan Collins in the 2017 road movie The Time of Their Lives was more of a triumph of feelgood than drama or comedy. Collins was made OBE in 2001.
She first met Alderton when he played Dr Richard Moone in Emergency Ward 10, and she was cast in a 1963 episode as Nurse Elliott. They married in 1970 following his divorce from Jill Browne, his co-star in the TV hospital soap. He, their three children, Nicholas, Kate and Richard, and Louise survive her.
• Pauline Angela Collins, actor, born 3 September 1940; death announced 6 November 2025
