Shirley Valentine gave Pauline Collins a role to match her talent. She seized it with style and glee

The film for which the actor, who has died aged 85, is best-remembered is also that in which she was afforded most airtime. If only more film-makers had managed to channel her warm, sharp charmPauline Collins was the smart, funny, cherubically sexy female actor in the 1970s who became a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic in the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of its day.She played Sarah, the pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past, who has a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved and which carried on into spinoff shows Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly. Continue reading...

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