Pauline Collins, British actress who won cult following for Shirley Valentine, dies at 85

By Canadian Press on November 6, 2025.

LONDON (AP) — Pauline Collins, the versatile British actress who won a cult following for her portrayal on stage and on screen of Shirley Valentine, a disillusioned middle-aged housewife finding excitement in Greece, has died. She was 85.

In a statement Thursday, her family said that Collins died peacefully at her care home in north London this week, having endured Parkinson’s for several years.

In a long career that spanned television, film and theater, Collins was adept at playing an array of roles, all of which she infused with her trademark authenticity that indisputably earned her the status of a “national sweetheart” in the U.K.

“Pauline was so many things to so many people, playing a variety of roles in her life,” the family said. “A bright, sparky, witty presence on stage and screen.”

Collins got her big break in 1969 when she starred in the first series of the BBC comedy series “The Liver Birds” about the lives and loves of two young women sharing an apartment in Liverpool.

Collins did not become a household name until 1971 when she won a regular role in the ITV drama “Upstairs Downstairs” about the lives of an aristocratic family and their servants in a top-end property in London.

But it was her eponymous performance in “Shirley Valentine” that won her plaudits around the world. She first played the character in a one-woman show at the Vaudeville Theatre in London’s West End in 1988, reprising the show the following year on Broadway.

She earned an Academy Award nomination in 1990 for her starring performance in the movie, that required her to emote the mundanity of loneliness, the thrills of self-discovery and the re-emergence of Shirley’s youthful aspirations as she holidayed on a Greek island with a friend, played by Alison Steadman. While there, she had her romantic emotions reinvigorated by by a local fisherman, played by Tom Conti.

“She will always be remembered for Shirley Valentine, not only for her Oscar nomination or the film itself, but for clean-sweeping all seven awards when she portrayed her on Broadway in the stage play, in which she played every character herself,” her husband of 56 years and fellow actor John Alderton said.

“But her greatest performance was as my wife and mother to our beautiful children,” added Alderton, who regularly performed alongside Collins.

Pan Pylas, The Associated Press

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