Jill Gascoine, who was best known for the TV series The Gentle Touch, has died after suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She was reportedly 83.
Gascoine rose to fame in the 1970s drama The Onedin Line, which was about a Liverpool shipping company, before landing a starring role in The Gentle Touch, the first major British police drama with a female lead, which ran from 1980 to 1984.
She played Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes, an officer struggling to juggle her career with bringing up her son alone after her husband was murdered.
Gascoine reprised the role of DI Forbes in 1985 for spin-off series CATS Eyes, about a team of female detectives working covertly for the Home Office.
She also has a second career as a novelist in the 1990s, and her first book, 1994's Addicted, was about an actress in her 50s who embarks on a destructive affair with a half-English and half-Spanish actor in his 30s.
Gascoine's second husband Alfred Molina is an English actor of Italian and Spanish descent, and some two decades her junior.
She suffered from depression throughout much of her life, and said she believed it had stemmed from an unhappy experience at school.
In 2013, Gascoine revealed that she had Alzheimer's disease, during a Beverly Hills gala set up to raise money to fight the disease.
