Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an actress. She's been entertaining television audiences for more than 20 years

appearing in popular series like Emergency Ward 10 and upstairs downstairs. She and her husband,

John Alderton, became one of the country's most famous acting couples with such series as no honestly and more recently forever green.

At the same time she's enjoyed a theatrical career and it's this which has recently burgeoned into huge success.

Her portrayal of Shirley Valentine, the Trapped Liverpool Housewife, who finds love on a Greek holiday,

has won great acclaim in the West End and on Broadway.

It's now been turned into a film and its leading lady at the age of 49 has become an international

star.

She is Pauline Collins.

Pauline, how much difference have you found between being a well-known actress and an

international star?

Not a lot, yet. I don't really think of myself as being an international star. The one

lovely thing is that I've got to move around a lot more because the film company pushed

me around the world and there's more to come yet there's Japan and Australia

in the new year to sell the film. The difference I suppose from a career point of view

is that I've had lots of stuff sent to me that obviously would never have come my way.

That started while I was on Broadway in fact of American films and nobody had heard of me

of course before so the likelihood of my getting even a cough and a spit in the American film was extremely remote.

So that's the difference that it's made.

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