IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE HARDEST LETTER ANYONE HAD TO
WRITE, AND IS UNDENIABLY MOVING, YET PAULINE COLLINS’
HALLMARK, HER HUMOUR, KEEPS EVERYTHING MOVING AT A
SWIFT PACE - IT IS HARD TO PUT DOWN’
Choice -
In 1964, in a bare room in Waterloo, a young actress gave her baby for
adoption. They were to be parted for more than twenty years. The
actress was Pauline Collins. The baby was her daughter Louise.
LETTER TO LOUISE is a poignant, yet often funny, memoir of the
months leading up to that day in Waterloo. In it Pauline Collins recalls
the idyllic time spent in rep in Killarney, playing in a different play
every night, seven days a week, living in digs — and falling in love. After
the season had finished, she found she was pregnant. Frightened and
alone now, she decided to have the baby, hiding the fact from family,
agents and friends.
Going to ground, she waited for the baby to be born in a home for
unmarried mothers, buoyed up by the kindness and humour of the other
residents, and the nuns who cared for them. Yet she soon came to
realise that she had no choice but to give her daughter away.
Reluctantly she got on with life, hnally achieving success and personal
happiness. But she never forgot Louise and their story has the ultimate
happy ending — the day they were reunited twenty-two years later.