Pauline Collins, the exuberant British actress who inspired women — and men, too — to do something to change their unhappy lives with her Oscar-nominated and Olivier- and Tony-winning performances in Shirley Valentine, has died. She was 85.
Collins’ death in her home in London — she had dealt with Parkinson’s disease for several years — was announced Thursday by her family.
Collins also was known for her BAFTA-nominated turn as the cheerful yet troublemaking parlor maid Sarah Moffatt on the first two seasons of Upstairs, Downstairs. Her character had a romance with chauffeur Thomas Watkins, played by Collins’ husband and frequent acting partner, John Alderton.
Collins also was memorable as the Irish nurse who convinces a doctor (Patrick Swayze) to help her run a clinic in India in Roland Joffé’s City of Joy (1992) and as a real-life missionary who helps organize a women’s vocal orchestra in a Japanese World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road (1997), also starring Glenn Close and Frances McDormand.
Collins reunited with Close to portray the hotel owner in Rodrigo García’s Albert Nobbs (2011) and starred alongside Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly and Tom Courtney as a retired opera singer beset by dementia in Quartet (2012), directed by Dustin Hoffman.
Shirley Valentine, of course, tells the story of a middle-aged British housewife and mother who leaves her humdrum existence (and talking to the wall) behind when she defiantly goes to Greece on holiday with her girlfriend and rediscovers passion and the joy of living.
Collins first played the role in 1988 when Willy Russell’s one-woman play, directed by Simon Callow, opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in London’s West End. She won the Olivier Award for best actress, then filmed the Lewis Gilbert-helmed Paramount Pictures version that co-starred Tom Conti as the smooth-talking Costas.
After that, Collins headed to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, where she portrayed Shirley for five months starting in February 1989 and won the Tony for best actress in a play that June.
“What’s marvelous about being here is it’s proof that miracles can happen at any time in our lives, even when you’re getting on a bit,” she said in her Tony acceptance speech. “It means there’s hope and you must all continue to dream your dreams, because they’ll come true.”
The movie hit theaters in September 1989, and Collins was nominated for the Academy Award for best actress, though she lost out to Jessica Tandy of Driving Miss Daisy on Oscar night.
Shirley Valentine serves as an escape for those who envision a life more exciting, a fact to which Collins attributed its success. “The Mediterranean is littered with people … who have gone on holiday and never returned,” she said in a 1990 interview. “There are thousands of Shirley Valentines all over the place.”
She continued: “Obviously, women identify with [the character] very strongly, although men [do too]. Everyone identifies with being in the situation where their lives are limited in some way, by circumstance or by other people telling them what they should and should not do.”
Collins was born on Sept. 3, 1940, in Devon, England, to Irish parents Mary and William, a teacher and headmaster, respectively. After growing up in Liverpool, where she attended Catholic school, she studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama.
She initially followed her parents into education, working as a teacher until 1962, when she made her stage debut in A Gazelle in Park Lane in Windsor. Her first film role came as a dancer in a strip club in Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966).
She nabbed a part on the BBC’s Doctor Who in the 1967 serial “The Faceless Ones” but turned down a regular role as the Doctor’s companion, deciding she’d rather pursue a wider variety of acting experiences.
“I thought it was like a prison sentence,” she told The Guardian in 2012. “Maybe it would have given me a profile early in my career, but then I would have missed so many things.” (In 2006, she returned to Doctor Who to play Queen Victoria in an episode.)
Two years after starring with Polly James as single roommates on the first season of the Liverpool-set The Liver Birds, Collins in 1971 was hired for ITV’s Upstairs, Downstairs to portray the maid Sarah, who at one point leaves Eaton Place to become a singer at a music hall, only to return.
She and Alderton later reprised their roles for the spinoff Thomas and Sarah (1979), in which the couple leave their life of service to run a garage.
Collins and Alderton also acted together on the 1974-75 sitcom No, Honestly; on the 1975-76 anthology series Wodehouse Playhouse; on the 1983 animated kids series Little Miss; on the 1989-92 drama Forever Green; in the 2002 film Mrs. Caldicot’s Cabbage War; and in a 2004 production of Richard Harris’ Going Straight at Theatre Royal Bath (their daughter, Kate Alderton, was in that as well).
“I tell you what, we have always been movers-on,” Collins said in 2013 of her and her husband. “Everybody has to do a series now and stay on for 10 years or whatever. But both of us liked to change after doing one or two.”
And they apparently never brought their work home. “We’ve got three children,” Alderton said. “We stop work at half past five … or 10 o’clock [for a stage show].”
In 2015-16 on the BBC series Dickensian, which brought together Charles Dickens characters for a mystery story, Collins played Mrs. Gamp, a petty thief and healer. “But she always likes to be paid in gin,” she noted. Collins had to watch others for tips on how to play drunk since she didn’t imbibe.
Her résumé also included the films My Mother’s Courage (1995) — she played a Jewish woman who escapes the Holocaust in what she said was her most meaningful role — and the road trip movie Time of their Lives (2017), also starring Joan Collins, along with the TV series The Ambassador, Bleak House and Mount Pleasant.
In 2001, she was made an OBE for her services to acting.
While working during a season of reparatory theater in Killarney, Ireland, Collins had a romance with actor Tony Rohr and gave birth to a daughter in secret in 1964. She gave up the baby for adoption to a couple she thought were better suited to raise her.
More than two decades later, mother and daughter reunited, and Collins reflected on the experience in her 1992 book, Letter to Louise.
Collins married Alderton in 1969. Survivors include their children, Nicholas, Kate and Richard.
In a 1989 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Collins said that her only “sorrow” about Shirley Valentine was that she “wasn’t younger and thinner [when she played her].
“But if I were Jamie Lee Curtis,” she added with a giggle, “I wouldn’t have been right for the part.”
