3 hours ago
5
Pauline Collins was a unique phenomenon: a superb light-comedy actress – as she described herself – who was unerringly able to reach emotional depths that reduced the stoniest-hearted of audiences to tears. She did this supremely, of course, in Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine, the one-woman play in which I directed her in the West End and on Broadway. This performance was so natural, so deftly balanced between innate cheekiness and a devastating awareness that her life was about to pass her by, that many people assumed it was effortless.
On the contrary: she found it hugely challenging. Though she knew the play was a masterpiece, the prospect of doing it filled her with dread. Rehearsals were far from easy. The play is essentially a comic monologue and calls for very particular skills not possessed by all actors. I forced the poor woman to come into rehearsal every day and tell a new joke – torture for her, second nature to Shirley. Then there was the matter of getting her to credibly cook egg and chips while telling the story of her life. I knew she had to get all of that – the jokes and the chips – into her bones before she could stand before us as a three-dimensional person telling us deep truths about her life and the lives of millions of other women, all the while preparing the evening meal. As she struggled, Willy Russell began to have doubts about having cast her. “She’ll be fine,” he said, “but she won’t be Shirley.”
At the first preview, the onstage lights suddenly crashed after three minutes. Out of the dark came the voice of Shirley Valentine: “Hey! Wha’s going on? I paid me electric bills, right up to date.” Huge laughter from an audience that realised she was improvising, a thing she had dreaded all her acting life. Willy grasped my arm in the dark and whispered urgently: “She’s got it. That’s pure Shirley. There’s nothing to worry about.”
In life, she was irresistible: kind, outrageous, sexy, loving, wickedly funny. We first met when I was cast opposite her in Bernard Slade’s Romantic Comedy. The director invited us both to supper. “So, you’re a poofter, then, are you?” she said, before I sat down. I confessed that I was. “Good, right,” she said briskly. “Got that out of the way.”
Both in London and in New York, she spread love and naughtiness throughout the theatre; every day was a party. Even those gnarled, cussed old backstage Broadway crews adored her. After a few triumphant months she left the New York production in a blur of emotion, her Tony award in her luggage. Days later, her successor having now taken over, the atmosphere backstage and front of house had changed totally, now functional and impersonal again.
Her range was immense, much greater than she admitted to. I directed her again in Shades, a superb new play by Sharman Macdonald in which she played a woman whose husband has died young, leaving her in charge of their son, who does everything he can to stop her from committing herself to another man. It was a painful and complex relationship which she played with devastating honesty, to the acclaim of critics and to full houses.
But, for reasons which I never completely understood, she hated doing it. So there was no point now in my trying to persuade her to play the lead in Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock or Willy Loman’s wife, Linda, in Death of a Salesman. Never mind: what she did as Shirley and on screen in countless witty and brilliantly subtle performances was gift enough. What she gave to those of us who got to know her privately, as well as her audiences, remains an ineffaceable memory.
