Upstairs, Downstairs
Out of costume
Before UpDown 1

Here is Pauline Collins in the 1965 drama-documentary Secrets Of A Windmill Girl. It follows the adventures of two young girls (played by Collins and April Wilding) who decide to go into burlesque at London's legendary Windmill Theatre. Ironically, the theatre had closed (and been converted into a cinema) just a year before the movie went into production. Click for a bigger version.

In 1967, Pauline Collins played Samantha Briggs in the Doctor Who story, The Faceless Ones. The character had originally been intended to be a regular companion of the Doctor, but Collins didn't want to commit herself to an ongoing series at this time and so her character remained confined to this one story. Click on the montage to see a larger version.
In the lower picture she is pictured with Gilly Fraser, who played a fellow stewardess in the same story.
Of the five episodes of this six-part story that Collins appeared in, sadly only one episode still exists. Pauline returned to Doctor Who – playing Queen Victoria – in 2006.

A couple of years later, in 1969, Collins appeared in The Liver Birds – a BBC sitcom about the life and loves of two single girls living in Liverpool, also starring Polly James. After making a pilot show and four subsequent episodes, the BBC abruptly curtailed the series and Collins departed under something of a cloud.
The reasons given for Collins' vanishing act vary – a "clash of personalities" between the two leads being the most common explanation.
A year or so later the programme was relaunched with Nerys Hughes instead of Collins, and then ran successfully for over 80 episodes, including a 1996 revival series. Subsequently, the Collins episodes were more or less written out of TV history, and relatively few people seem to be aware they were made. All five have been wiped, and only a few pre-filmed location scenes (and the title sequence) from the second episode still remain in the BBC archives.

Jean Marsh in, of all things, a 1959 episode of CBS' The Twilight Zone called The Lonely. In the story, Jack Warden plays a lonely criminal imprisoned on an asteroid. A sympathetic supply-ship captain takes pity on him and leaves him a robot friend, with whom he falls in love! Marsh remembers: "I remember filming The Twilight Zone out in the desert and I've never forgotten the address of the place where I was staying – Furnace Creek Inn, Funeral Range, Desolation Canyon, Death Valley. Out there every place had been the scene of some pioneering disaster. It was 130 degrees in the shade. I had an air-conditioned caravan, sacks of ice, jugs full of pure lemon juice, sticks of iced cologne, cool clothes, a swimming pool and a nurse standing by – and I still felt dodgy from time to time! The crew, on the other hand, were falling about all over the place." Click the picture for a bigger version.

Jean Marsh as Space Security Service agent Sara Kingdom in the 1965/6 Doctor Who story, The Daleks' Master Plan. In this story, she played opposite William Hartnell as the Doctor. The story was banned in Australia where several of its scenes were deemed too nasty for children, particularly a sequence where Marsh's character "ages to death" in a matter of minutes.
Years before her Upstairs, Downstairs time, Marsh had been married to another Doctor Who – Jon Pertwee.

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