Pauline Collins, actress who found fame as Shirley Valentine, the housewife who escapes to Greece

In 1965 she returned to London to make her West End debut in Passion Flower Hotel, set in a libidinous girls’ school. Later that year she made her film debut in Secrets of A Windmill Girl (1966), playing a stripper who would not strip, and for the rest of the 1960s she consolidated her reputation in light comedy.

Having played Samantha Briggs in the 1967 Doctor Who serial The Faceless Ones, Pauline Collins was offered the chance to continue in the series as a new companion for the Doctor, but declined the invitation; she eventually returned to Doctor Who in 2006 as Queen Victoria in Tooth and Claw. In 1969 she was in the pilot episode and first series of The Liver Birds.

Appearing as Sarah in the first episode of Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971, Pauline Collins proved so popular that she was asked to return as a recurring character. The following year she did so, on the point of giving birth to the Bellamys’ first (illegitimate) grandchild. Meanwhile she continued to appear in live theatre, in Come As You Are, a revival of The Happy Apple (both 1970) and as a Liverpool schoolteacher in Judies (1974).

While appearing in The Night I Chased the Women With an Eel (Comedy, 1969), she met the actor John Alderton with whom she had worked in Emergency – Ward 10 on television and married him the following year.

One of her most successful roles was as Clara Danby in the ITV sitcom No – Honestly, based on Charlotte Bingham’s novels and written by Bingham and her husband Terence Brady. Pauline Collins played an innocent debutante opposite John Alderton as her worldly spouse.