Pauline Collins said she felt as though she’d had her “heart ripped out” and lived with guilt and regret over giving up her daughter every single day of her life.

In 1963, at the age of 22, Pauline Collins was a struggling young actress working in Ireland when she discovered she was pregnant. After a painful breakup with her then boyfriend, she found herself alone and frightened, unable to tell her parents — both devout Catholic school teachers. With no financial security or support, she turned to a convent in Killarney, where the nuns cared for her throughout the pregnancy.

Pauline spent six weeks looking after her newborn daughter, Louise, before making the heartbreaking decision to give her up for adoption, believing it was the only way to give her baby a stable and secure future. She would later describe it as “the most awful thing I ever had to do.”

Pauline wrote about the experience in her powerful 1992 memoir Letter to Louise, a heartbreaking yet hopeful account of her journey towards forgiveness and reunion.

“I had her adopted when she was six weeks old,” she said. “It was the most awful thing ever to do. It broke my heart. It was like having a piece of your heart ripped out. I think it floors you for the rest of your life.”

“I remember the last time I saw you,” she wrote in her memoir. “We were about six feet apart. Every day of my life I’ve relived that moment, replayed each second like a book of flicker pictures, clinging frame by frame to the last images of you.”

Pauline later admitted she had kept her secret for years, only telling her parents five years after the adoption.

“They felt very let down because I hadn’t been able to confide in them,” she said. “But they understood that I did it for what I then thought were good motives — really stupid motives, trying to protect everybody.”

The actress explained her reasons in painfully honest terms:

“My parents were teachers at Catholic schools and I hadn’t a penny in the world. I thought it would be harder for a girl — people would say she’d go the same way as her mother. For that reason, I decided on adoption.”

Despite her career success — first in Upstairs, Downstairs, later in Shirley Valentine — Pauline carried the memory with her always.

“Why did I give you away?” she wrote. “Even now, I feel a blow in the solar plexus when I consider that question. It was like my soul was punched out through my throat.”

Then, two decades later, came an extraordinary moment of healing. When Louise turned 21, she reached out to her birth mother. Their reunion was everything Pauline had hoped for.

“She’s been quite extraordinarily mature and compassionate towards me,” Pauline said at the time. “Even in her first letter, she gave me the option of not replying, which I think at 21 is very mature. We slipped back into each other’s lives with unbelievable ease.”

By then, Pauline had married actor John Alderton in 1969, and together they raised three children — Nicholas, Kate, and Richard. Her daughter Kate once told her she wished she had a sister. “Two weeks later,” Pauline recalled with a smile, “she had one.”

Their story — one of heartbreak, secrecy, and eventual reunion — became one of the most moving real-life tales ever shared by a British actress.

In her own words, Pauline said she always knew the day would come:

“I knew we would be reunited one day. I didn’t know when, but I knew it would have to be at her instigation.”

Pauline Collins, who passed away a few days aged 85, leaves behind not only a remarkable acting legacy but also a story of love, courage, and forgiveness that touched hearts far beyond the screen.

A mother’s love, once lost — found again.