Pauline
Biography
Pauline Fossil, the eldest of the Fossil sisters, was born around 1920 in the month of December. She was found as an infant by Professor Matthew Brown (also known as Great Uncle Matthew or Gum) on a lifebelt, after Gum's adventuring ship was wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean. No more is known about Pauline's background.
Gum brought Pauline back to his Cromwell Road house in London, where she was deposited with his niece, Sylvia, and her nurse Nana. At first reluctant, they quickly came to adore Pauline, and adjusted to having children in the house. Pauline and Petrova, the closest in age, tended to interact more together than they did with Posy, who was both younger as well as lost in her own world of dance.
Pauline showed signs of a good memory for recitation and a dramatic flair from an early age. When she and her two sisters enrolled in the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, she was soon sidelined into the acting stream. Her first real acting job came one year later as the boy Tyltyl in the Academy's charity performance of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, alongside her sister Petrova (who played the younger sister Myltyl). The next year, upon turning twelve, she was sent to audition for the role of Alice in Alice in Wonderland. She won the role despite being outperformed by the homely Winnifred, whose story provides a continuing subplot.
Pauline's success as Alice soon went to her head, and she became rude and bumptious to everyone around her. The final straw came when she deliberately and continually broke the rules of the theater, and was forced to give up her role to Winnifred, her understudy. Pauline, after a solitary breakdown (shown as a bathtub chat with Petrova in the 2007 film and a public moment of reconciliation with Winnifred in the 1975 series), realizes how selfish she had become, and is rarely troubled by a swelled head thereafter. She went on to win roles in Shakespearean and fairytale theater roles while continuing to train.
While Posy connected mainly with Madame Fidolia at the Academy, it was Miss Jay who mentored Pauline, preparing her for French and English acting roles and giving her advice. "N'oubliez jamais qu'un actrice peut apprendre j'usqua sa dernier jour," she told her: never forget that an actress can learn until her final day. Pauline takes the lesson to heart. (Miss Jay doesn't appear in the 1975 version, and while she is in the 2007 version, we never see her interact with any of the girls.)
As the eldest child and chief earner of the family, Pauline took great pride in helping with the bills and providing pocket money for the others. She was able to help pay for small vacations for the sisters, Sylvia, and Nana, which broke up the hardworking toil of their lives. Pauline felt a great deal of responsibility towards her family and transmitted some of this to Petrova, who otherwise would not be cajoled into stage work.
Pauline began her education at Cromwell House, a local girls' school, where she attended classes for three years. Throughout her training and performing, Pauline, like Petrova, studied towards her School Certificate with Doctors Smith and Jakes, two of the boarders in the house. Pauline's success in an American film test won her her first movie role as Henrietta, the youngest sister of the exiled Prince Charles II. Pauline was unimpressed with her own work and the technical aspects of movie-making, as she preferred the stage; but she was met with great critical and public acclaim, and was quickly offered a five-year contract in Hollywood.
We last see Pauline in the film version of Ballet Shoes as she comes out of signing the contract, looking with mixed feelings towards moving to Hollywood with Sylvia.
Pauline's next appearance is in the book Curtain Up (retitlted Theater Shoes in the United States). Pauline is in Hollywood and while she does not physically appear in the story, she does make a tremendous difference for the characters who do. Each of the Fossil sisters, upon leaving the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, gave the Academy to be used when a child of great promise but little money needed it. Posy's scholarship was for dancing, Petrova's ends up with someone very much like her, and Pauline's is for acting. Pauline's scholarship is presented to one of the protagonists of the novel, Sorrel Forbes. Pauline keeps up a correspondence with Sorrel after learning that Madame Fidolia awarded Sorrel her scholarship, and she seems very much the sweet little girl we last saw in Ballet Shoes.
Pauline's adventure is not over, however. In The Noel Streatfeild Christmas Holiday Book, Streatfeild reveals what has happened to the characters of Ballet Shoes in the appropriately titled short story "What Happened to Pauline, Petrova, and Posy?" While Posy becomes a dancing legend first in Czechoslovakia and then in New York and Petrova trains to be a pilot, Pauline is in Hollywood with Sylvia. She has her own agent who insists upon Pauline being the "most up-to-date teenager to be found anywhere." Her first film role in Hollywood was playing a girl named Sara, who ran away from home after finding out that her parents no longer loved each other. Sara ran away to Europe and had extraordinary adventures; but of course, in the end, her parents found her and were so happy that they joined together again. Pauline is still having trouble adjusting from working in a theater to working in a film and asks the question "Why?" a lot. At first her acting coach thought that it was because Pauline was rude and didn't want to do what she was told, but soon came to see that Pauline asked why she had to do something so that she could understand it and become better at it. After this, she and her coach became good friends, and it was because of her cach that Pauline made the enormous success that she did.
Pauline and Sylvia live in a very nice house with a swimming pool on the lawn and they have a car and chauffeur. However, Sylvia always tells Petrova in her letters that they "live very simply for Hollywood." While in Hollywood under her contract, Pauline insists upon two things. One is that she have a private governess to teach her, and the other was that every eighteen months she has time off to visit Petrova in England and Posy in Czechoslovakia, because after all, "I have two sisters and I must see them. We're a family."