New Doctor David Tennant with current sidekick Billie Piper Pauline as Samantha Pauline Collins Picture: John Carey

Who's that girl?

Cher as Shirley Valentine? Thank heavens for Pauline Collins. The actress, who is about to step into the Tardis, talks to Ruth Gorb

IN the early days of Doctor Who, when Patrick Troughton played the good doctor, he had a delectable sidekick called Samantha Briggs. She was played by a little-known actress called Pauline Collins.
Almost 40 years on, the extremely well-known Pauline Collins will be back, for one glorious episode only, in a new series of Doctor Who scheduled to go out this Easter. The Doctor Who girl has been whirled through the time machine and will emerge as Queen Victoria.
There is a predilection among our distinguished actresses to play the queen. Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Prunella Scales have all found the idea irresistible, and Pauline Collins is relishing the challenge. “Although you shouldn’t have to do anything, really; the authority of royalty should be effortless,” she says. “As to what on earth Queen Victoria is doing with Doctor Who, her lips are sealed.
It will certainly be a change from her heart-breaking and scene-stealing portrayal of Miss Flyte in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House. She loved the character, she says. “It was funny and it was terribly sad. When I read the book I found it overwhelming. The situation of Victorian petitioners in the courts, who end up destitute, who like Miss Flyte are at the mercy of men like Crooke – unbearable.”
As someone who has always looked far younger than her age, it came as something of a shock to see her as the dotty old lady Miss Flyte. The round face and dimples and huge eyes are family characteristics, she says, and came in handy when she landed the part of 15-year-old Sarah in Upstairs Downstairs – she was 30 at the time.
It was that role which was the breakthrough in her career, although her sense of comedy was apparent from the age of eight when her schoolteacher mother put her in an amateur dramatic society production of a play called The Dear Departed. “I went down like a storm and I discovered I really loved having an audience.” The acting bug was dormant for a while – “although I always made my sister laugh” – because she had a yen to go to Oxford to read English. “But you had to have Latin in those days. I was quite clever and quite academic, but Tacitus defeated me.”
She opted for the Central School of Drama, and did a three-year teaching course because that was the only way she could get a grant. All her family had been teachers, and loved it, so she was quite content to do some supply teaching to keep the wolf from the door.
Then out of the blue, she landed a job at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. “It was the part of an Arabian maid-servant, and when I went for the audition I saw an exotic Turkish girl coming down the stairs and though I didn’t have a hope,” she says. “But I got it. ‘It’s not your looks we care about,’ they said, ‘it’s your comedy.”
That sense of comedy burst upon a delighted television audience with Upstairs Downstairs.
Looking back it seems that she was always in it, but in fact she and her husband, John Alderton, who played the Eaton Place chauffeur, were only in 12 episodes.
“We were in the first one, which was wonderfully written by Fay Weldon. That was the only one they let her write; they thought she was too left-wing.”
It was, she says, a wonderful kick-off to her career. She hardly looked back after that, acting in 14 plays in the West End, some with her husband. Then came the next big breakthrough. She landed that peach of a part for any actress, Shirley Valentine. She played it first in the theatre, then Lewis Gilbert bought the film rights. “Five people came from Paramount to see me. They wanted Cher to play the part,” she says.
Cher did not get the part – it would, one is tempted to say, have been a very different film – and Pauline Collins became the quintessential Shirley Valentine.
“It was such a terrific piece of writing, and the most enjoyable job ever,” Pauline says. “After the film we played it on Broadway, and I won the Tony Award.” (She was also best film actress in the 1990 Baftas, and was nominated for an Oscar). “I was in New York for six months, and John and the kids came and went all the time – we all loved it there.”
She and the family are very much home-based now, and home means Hampstead. She and John Alderton met in the 1960s when she was a student, working as a waitress in the Coffee Cup in Hampstead High Street, and he was renting a flat for £4 a week above the café. Hampstead is where they have stayed ever since, and they have lived in their current house for almost 30 years.
Pauline Collins remembers with affection being directed by James Roose-Evans in the early days of the Hampstead Theatre, and the stage has been an integral part of her life.
Not so much nowadays, as going into the theatre every night becomes less attractive. She concentrates on films and television, and despite her triumph as Miss Flyte says she is not drawn to the classics, but prefers new writing from new playwrights.
As for Doctor Who, when we spoke she was evidently having a whale of a time in rehearsal. Scriptwriter Russell T Davies has imbued her Queen Victoria with more humour than usual, which suits her down to the ground, and she thinks that the new Doctor, David Tennant, has a strong sense of the ridiculous which all the best have had from Patrick Troughton onwards – “but I think this is the best one yet.”
Now that it has all come full circle, how does she think the new manifestation of Doctor Who measures up to the past? “It’s wild. Quite scarey, which they can do because there’s more technology. But it is, quite simply, a phenomenon.”

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