Diplomatic move

HERE is still a familiar face from Sarah in Upstairs Downstairs to Shirley Valentine, the latter being her one immortal role, the part she was perhaps born to play, a cuddly middle-aged Liverpudlian yearning for another life and finding, one.

Pauline Collins, Oscar-nominated star, was, for a while, the toast of the entertainment world. Then her profile became lower key, though she continued making films, notably Flowers Of The Forest last year, a controversial TV drama about child abuse. Now, at 56, she is back in the limelight once again and she's playing - of all things, - the British ambassador to Ireland.

You expect the bubbly, down-to-earth person - she looks the part - what you get is a sophisticated, elegant, reserved woman who occasionally strikes you as having a rod of iron beneath the cheerful, friendly exterior. She has a very still face, but think of the last scene of Shirley Valentine, where, totally in control, she sets out the agenda to Bernard Hill for their" future life; then think of the control an ambassador has. But, although she's a bit wary and guarded, Collins is also charming and welcoming, and chats happily about her new job.

That job is the role of ambassador Harriet Smith, in a new BBC 1 six-part drama series which starts shooting in Dublin on Monday and will be shown on television later this year.

Pauline Collins is sitting on one of three white couches in her elegant, comfortable sitting room in Hampstead, petite and neat in a casual top, trousers and pumps as the wind howls around the home she shares with her, husband, and frequent screen partner, John Alderton.

She has just been away from home for a few months, in Australia filming Paradise Road with Glenn Close, a film set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp where the inmates form an acapella orchestra - hence her straight hair with blonde highlights - "I look like nothing on earth in it - I've round glasses and this straight haircut in a clip!"

The Ambassador will involve a very different role - a very definitely fictional one (the series was conceived before Veronica Sutherland took up office). She plays a high-powered diplomat whose husband was killed in Lebanon in a car bomb intended for her, and who has two sons. The series aims to show a woman working at a high level, dealing with the strains and moral choices of such a job, and balancing her family life with the professional.

The producers - it is being made by Ecosse Films for BBC Northern Ireland, with a budget of nearly £4 million - were consciously looking for a storyline with a strong female role, following on the success of series like Prime Suspect and The Governor, but they wanted it to be more realistic, and representative of high profile women in the real world - Mary Robinson, or Nicola Horlick, for example who also have families.

"This is unashamedly a BBC flagship programme, executive producer Douglas Rae of Ecosse Films told me. The world of diplomacy is certainly a change from medical or police dramas, but to set it in Ireland, given the delicate relationship and fraught history the two countries have, seems an odd choice.

Producer Stephen Smallwood says Ireland was chosen as an English-speaking country with cultural similarities with which audiences could identify. The Government incentives for film-making were a factor, but with higher production costs here those gains are almost cancelled out.

The series comes under the popular drama category and so will not be dealing directly with the Anglo-Irish situation, though it forms a backdrop to the storylines, which have a thriller format. The writing team is headed by the series creator Russell Lewis, who writes Morse, QC and Sharpe, and most of the cast - it also stars Owen Roe - and crew are Irish. Both Smallwood and Rae are being very careful not to offend Irish sensibilities, either political or cultural, and aim to present a stereotype-free image of Dublin as a thriving, modern, European city.

Rae points out that no other contemporary drama series, other than Family, has been set in Dublin. "If we get it right, Dublin will be to The Ambassador as Oxford is to Morse," he says. They'll be shooting around the city, and the embassy will be "played" by a Georgian terraced house (in contrast to the real life bunker), and the "residence" will be Cabinteely House.

This is Pauline Collins's first time working in Dublin, though she and Alderton visit Ireland most years, especially Cashel House in Connemara and the west coast. Her blood is all Irish - Liverpool-Irish, that is - and her great (or perhaps great great, she says) grand uncle was Jeremiah Joseph Callanan, the poet who wrote Gougane Barra.

One of her earliest professional engagements was here - she worked in Killarney in rep during the summer of 1963, having auditioned in London after seeing an ad in The Stage and, landing the job of "Assistant Stage Manager and small parts". The sudden departure of the juvenile lead meant those parts were hers and she talks warmly of working seven nights a week, doing 14 plays, putting the set up every morning, and getting a sleep-in on a Sunday until the call for 10 o'clock Mass. She later toured in the fit-ups ("my last salary in Ireland was £10 for the tour") with Jack McKenna.

Her big break on screen came at the relatively mature age of 30, in Upstairs Downstairs: "That's being repeated all over the place now - it's a bit disconcerting, isn't it, when you're 56 to see your 30-year-old self being trotted out every night?" She was in the first two series, 12 episodes in all, and Alderton was in six - "I got him that job!". A couple of years later they were to pick up the same roles in Thomas And Sarah, and that formed a pattern throughout their professional lives - in all, they have done six TV series together, including the more recent Forever Green.

"One of the lucky things in life is that we worked together, so we didn't have to deal with separation," she says.

They have three children. Nick is a writer and director and Kate has just finished drama school and was in.

Fierce Creatures - "she literally flits across the screen". Collins acknowledges her children have chosen a hard profession but "they've seen two people who've had a wonderful career." Their youngest son has gone another direction entirely and is studying cosmic physics and philosophy. Collins also has an older daughter Louise, conceived during her season in Killarney, who she gave up for adoption and was reunited with years later. In 1992 she published a book, Letters To Louise, about that experience and the severing of birth ties with adoption.

Their children have now all flown the coop, but Alderton is at home, and in the middle of the afternoon he brings us tea. "I'm sorry, there are no crumpets," he comments in a droll voice. "Only tea, and cucumber sandwiches if you'd like them." We settle on biscuits. Funnily enough, the sight of Collins at home is not as startling as seeing the greying but still boyish Alderton pop his head around the door.

SHIRLEY Valentine came at the age of 48. Collins was memorable playing opposite a delightful, if unlikely, Greek Tom Conti. Does she ever see him these days? "He's my neighbour," she grins.

It was a wonderful role and a huge success, and she was nominated for best actress Oscar. "I don't think it did so much for my career, but it was fantastic fun to go out there." She lights tip at the memory of it.

"But the most fantastic thing was that of course it was the same year as My Left Foot and Brenda Fricker was there, and she was someone I had known of through the years through another friend, and I had spoken to her, but I had never met her." She and John were sitting near Julia Roberts at the ceremony, "and when Brenda Fricker won, John jumped up and said `yes!' And Julia Roberts, who was up in same category, walked out. Because it's very important to them really, isn't it?" she says, maybe a little disingenuously."

"To be in the front row of the Oscars, with all the jokes being directed at you, is just incredible ... it's like something from another world. An also, the studio sends someone to do you up. They put on a completely different person, I didn't recognise myself at all, but it does work there, because the lights are so strong. And also the make-up girl gives you a straw so you don't mess up your lips - eating doesn't come into it. (Collins doesn't drink). And then all the hair is lacquered to, within an inch of its life.

"And a couple of days before, a costume designer and stylists came to have a look through stuff I had brought over - I'm not very good with clothes. `That's OK,' she said, but I think we could do better. And they then brought in six dresses from a Beverly Hills designer, one of which I liked. It was white, pearl-encrusted, down to the ground, a lovely shape, except it had a rather high neck, which I didn't like. And I said, do you have anything with a lower neck?' So she said, `you don't like the neck?' and (scissor motions) she cut this beaded dress! It's just wonderful to be taken control of like that and made to look glamorous."

Shirley Valentine, by Willy Russell, was an exceptional script, delightfully fantastical and rooted in reality at the same time. In general with scripts "I take really anything that pleases me, anything that I'm drawn to. On the whole I try to do jobs that are in some way uplifting, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're happy. I don't want to sound like Mary Poppins, but I don't like doing subjects which are (pause) bad for the spirit . . . To give you an illustration of that, I was offered a film about Denis Nilsen, the killer who chopped up young men, to play his woman friend. The terrifying thing about the film was that he was portrayed in such a sympathetic way. And I thought, that's a bad thing to do, a wrong thing to do. I think in a way that's what tips strange people over the edge."

She read two of The Ambassador scripts last year, and "said yes within 24 hours. It was so good. It's great also for someone of my age to be offered a strong role they do become less as you get older."

The Ambassador portrays a woman juggling motherhood and her career, and not always coming out smiling, and Pauline herself has been that soldier. She comments that anybody who works finds the balancing act hard. "When the children were younger we didn't play away that much, all our work was fairly parochial. I've only, started doing films since the age of 48. We had fantastic parents, the two of us, particularly John's parents, who used to move into our house, so although I felt all the guilt of a working mother, it was somewhat allayed by knowing that the grandmother was, there. But I think it's extremely difficult."

"On the whole the main thrust of The Ambassador is a good story. To say there is no political dimension is not true because of course it is there but that's not the role of the ambassador." Many of the storylines will involve Harriet Smith having to make difficult professional choices. "I think, men are more used to employing the manners of the market place than women. I don't know many women in big business, but I think a man would not find it hard to lie in business...One of the things I like about the ambassador is that she isn't battling(, against the men. But she is a woman who is very at peace with the centre of, herself.. . She has achieved that position on her merits."

Harriet Smith is "a grammar school ambassador, she's not from a privileged background, she's not one of the establishment, as some often are, though I'm not sure how many of the women are, because I think on the whole women have worked their way up.

Pauline Collins likes writing and, aside from her previous book, and some short stories, she has "another three books which are about to burst out, but I'm a terrible procrastinator. My publishers wanted to commission me to write another book, but I think, that's a terrible pressure." But she reckons one of the novels buzzing around - "a family saga" - will be the first to see the light of day. "I think that they sort of germinate in my mind and then I start to write."

She won't be drawn on other future plans: "I like change, and consequently I like travel," she says. "I never look beyond the next film, I like the insecurity of this work. I suppose it's easy to say that when you've had a pretty good career, but I like to think I wonder what Monday will bring. But having said that, I've signed options for The Ambassador.