Pauline 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.