It’s almost impossible to believe that Pauline is an octogenarian. She is brimming over with life and a slightly wicked sense of humour, sparkling with the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager.
One hilarious anecdote after another punctuated my afternoon chat with her, the very first in response to my asking where she was born.
Her birthplace was Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire where she arrived two months early, weighing just two-and-a-half pounds. In those days there were no incubators or special care units for premature babies so the tiny infant was wrapped in cotton wool and olive oil, and laid in front of the fire to keep her warm.
Her four-year-old brother was less than impressed by the new arrival and when Pauline’s mother went to check on the little one, to her horror she found that both baby and brother had somehow disappeared from the house.
A frantic search ensued and eventually the little boy was discovered at the bottom of the garden, putting the baby in the dustbin.
“You couldn’t really blame him, not wanting to have anything to do with a baby covered in rancid olive oil,” Pauline laughs.
Although she received no formal education, Pauline’s love of acting was born at a very early age as she was fascinated by variety shows and plays at the theatre and on television.
“I was not sent to school or taught at home, and worked full-time in shops from the age of 14,” she says. “Fortunately a friend’s parents had a television set and let me watch the plays broadcast on it, as a result of which I developed an obsession with drama and spent all my money on going to the theatre, whenever I could.
When she was 17, Pauline won a scholarship to RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Her talents as an actress were quickly recognised and saw her go into rep (repertory theatre) before moving into television. She worked as a professional actress both in theatre and television for about 40 years.
Like most actors, she found there were long spells when she was out of work, between roles, sometimes for considerable lengths of time.
“I got bored staring out of the window, waiting for the next job to come up, so I started adapting plays for television,” she recalls.
At the same time she was still appearing frequently on television, in game shows and plays. In those days TV was live rather than pre-recorded as much of it is nowadays, and she had to learn to cope with a whole host of hairy moments that could crop up during live filming.
One of those moments came about when she was doing a ‘two-hander’ DH Lawrence piece which was very intense and uninhibited, requiring both the players to be virtually naked.
“We were rehearsing two days before it went live but what we didn’t know was that the director was having a nervous breakdown. A camera script was vital for live TV so that the cameramen knew what they were doing and didn’t bump into each other. That script hadn’t been done so it was total chaos.
“At one point my co-star and I were being very intense and I heard one of the cameras crashing around the set. I knew I had to get up and go over to a table and chairs, but saw the camera knock them over. I watched for the red light to go on to show another camera was focusing on my fellow actor so I jumped out of bed and dashed over to put the furniture right, then had to rush back to bed in seconds to be sexy and intense when the red light came on to show a camera was focusing on me.”
Another chaotic scene erupted when Pauline was acting in a TV comedy series called the Theatre of the Absurd, each episode a half hour of madness which was like a forerunner to Monty Python.
Shot in front of a live audience, it was about a very ordinary suburban couple to whom extraordinary things happened. One episode, set in their living room, featured a large number of different animals, bizarrely pretending to be other creatures, including an Arab stallion in the guise of a dog. Also on the tiny set were a cat, parrot and a boa constrictor, to name just a few, each with its own handler.
“There were animals everywhere in a small space, complete chaos,” Pauline remembers with a laugh. “But I’d done a lot of rep which was good training for handling that kind of disaster as there were always calamities of one kind or another cropping up in rep that you had to get used to, things like a handle coming off when you went to open a door.
“Television was very different in those days from what we see nowadays and you just had to get on with it and hope for the best.”
Throughout the 1960s, Pauline appeared in leading roles on television but by then writing was starting to take over, with her wonderful sense of humour proving particularly strong. Along with fellow actor Edwin Apps, she branched out more into screenwriting and together they wrote the situation comedy All Gas and Gaiters for the BBC which ran from 1965 to 1972 and played to 15 million viewers.
Fifty years ago, she was the first woman to ever embark on writing and producing television comedy for the BBC and she did ruffle a few feathers among the broadcaster’s hierarchy.
“I was the first woman to write comedy for television and my memories of this were remembered in the 2016 BBC Radio 4 play All Mouth and Trousers,” she says.
“Writing sort of killed my acting career because writing to deadlines meant I had to turn down acting work.”
She did combine the two however, writing one-person plays and acting in them. In the 1980s she wrote an award-winning one-woman stage play, To Marie With Love, based on the life of Marie Stopes. She took this to the Edinburgh Festival in 1985 where it won a Fringe First Award.
Pauline toured extensively with ‘Marie’ both in the UK and abroad for several years, including a memorable visit to Kenya organised by the British Council.
“I was invited to go as part of the Mombasa Festival,” she says. “When I got there I discovered I was the festival – there was nothing else!
“I had to perform in a small theatre which hadn’t been used for years. It was filthy and the air was black with mosquitoes. I was told I didn’t have a stage manager because he had died of cerebral malaria.
“I set about cleaning the place and bought some coils that you can burn with a scent that mosquitoes hate so I put them all over the stage and auditorium. The changing room was dreadful, I couldn’t possibly use it so I had to change in the hall.
“My costume was dark red silk and the theatre was so hot that my dress was black with sweat and looked awful. The only thing I could think of was to line it with polythene bags, although that of course made it even warmer.
“With about ten minutes to go until the end of the performance I became aware that I could hear rustling and thought I could see smoke out of the corner of my eye. I’d always had a dread of a theatre catching fire and I was within seconds of saying to the audience ‘please leave your seats and leave the auditorium in an orderly fashion’ when I realised just in time that the rustling was from the polythene inside my dress and the smoke was coming from the anti-mosquito coils.”
Pauline continued acting and writing for several more years and married 30 years ago. Now aged 84, as time went by, she embraced a completely new artistic challenge – one which remains at the heart of her life.
“I started painting totally by chance,” she explains. “I was writing a play at the time but got really stuck with it and felt I was fed up with writing. A friend asked why didn’t I take up some kind of course. I’d always liked the idea of painting but didn’t want to go on a course by myself, so the friend said she would go with me.
“I’d never painted at all before but I got the bug and have painted ever since. I think the lovely thing about painting is that it is entirely yours. I like the idea that unlike writing, you don’t hand it over to other people to change or put their own stamp on it.
“When a painting works well, it’s marvellous, but I absolutely hate it at times when a painting doesn’t work out the way I want it to – that is very frustrating.
“I paint mainly from my imagination, an idea comes to me and I just have to do it. Lots of different things can trigger off an idea, sometimes it can be a poem I’ve read, a piece of music I’ve heard or just a tiny corner of a photo I’ve taken.”
Pauline loves to get feedback from people who see her work and occasionally humour can come to the fore again when she hears a remark.
“You do get some funny comments occasionally, such as ‘why did she paint that?’ Once a group of ladies came into the gallery and the one in charge told them ‘you have seven minutes here then we’ll have to leave’. They scuttled round and as they were going I heard one of them say ‘I do like the light fittings’. I tend to see comedy in everything.
“One day a man told me ‘I like all your work except that one’. He pointed to one of my landscapes and stated ‘I find that profoundly offensive’. I have no idea why he took offence at that particular painting – perhaps something unpleasant had happened to him in a similar place.”
Pauline began studying art in 1999 and just two years later she won the 2001 Winchester Art Competition, since then painting has been her full-time career.
“I’ve concentrated on art ever since, working every day in my studio in Lewes,” Pauline says. “I exhibit both in the UK and France and my work is collected internationally. I was a finalist in the 2017 National Art Competition.
“My greatest regret is that I didn’t have the opportunity to become an artist when I was young. However, I realise that although not directly connected, my experience in the theatre and television, both as a writer and actress, has uniquely informed my work as a painter.”