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.”
