THE PIONEER (REMEMBERING JILL GASCOIGNE)

After moving to LA, the English actress and author Jill Gascoine kind of faded from view.

Yet for a period in the 1980s, she broke convention as the star of Britain's favourite detective series 'The Gentle Touch'.

Born in London in 1937,  she cut her teeth as an actor in the Dundee Repertory Theatre and in Leicester where she worked with Ken Loach at the Living Theatre.

It was in Dundee that she would marry her first husband Bill Keith, a local hotelier with whom she would have two sons but it ended in divorce.

Scraping a living and supporting her two sons, she graduated to television roles building a career with appearances in popular shows during the 1970s like 'Dr Finlay's Casebook', 'Z Cars', 'Dixon of Dock Green', 'Late Night Theatre' 'Six Days of Justice', 'General Hospital', 'Softly, Softly', 'Taskforce' and 'Within These Walls'.

There was also a role in the raunchy 1975 British softcore sex comedy 'Confessions of A Pop Performer' with Robin Askwith.

And a role as Wendy as an adult in a live action TV production of 'Peter Pan' with Mia Farrow and Danny Kaye.

Her big breakthrough came in the BBC nautical soap 'The Onedin Line' where she played Letty for three series.

This led to her landing the role of Maggie Forbes in ITV's groundbreaking primetime London cop drama 'The Gentle Touch'.

Created by Terence Feely, it beat BBC1's 'Juliet Bravo' by four months to become the first police drama to be fronted by a woman and began with Maggie's husband being killed in the first episode.

Over five series, 'The Gentle Touch' acquired a reputation for its frank treatment of controversial issues like sexism, racism, pornography, homosexuality, mental health and euthanasia.

Gascoine famously encouraged one actress playing a prostitute to rewrite her dialogue after she complained it was not realistic. That actress was Lynda La Plante who would go on to write for ITV the iconic gangster series 'Widows' and the female led cop drama 'Prime Suspect'.

When 'The Gentle Touch' came to an end, Gascoine signed up to a 1984 spin-off 'CATS Eyes' with saw Leslie Ash which saw Forbes run a private detective agency in Kent.

She would later admit the spin-off was silly, aiming to be a British equivalent of 'Charlie's Angels' but it ran for three series and Wasa ratings success.

By the time it came to an end, she had been five years married to the actor Alfred Molina who she had fallen in love with as they shared the stage in a West End production of 'Destry Rides Again'.

There was a regular role in the final season of ITV's hit sitcom 'Hone to Roost' with John Thaw and Reece Dindsdale and she also joined Glenda Jackson, Richard Harris, Jenny Agutter, Nigel Hawthorne and Frank Finkay in Peter Duffell's 1990 adventure movie 'King of the Wind'.

Gascoine also popped up in episodes of the ITV series 'Boon', 'Taggart', 'El C.I.D.' with Amanda Redman and John Bird and Tony Dow's Screen One film 'Trust Me' which also starred husband Alfred Molina, Hywel Bennett and Roger Lloyd Pack.

As Alfred Molina's career started to blossom in Hollywood, she also tried to buikda career in LA but it proved more of a struggle.

There were minor movie roles as a waitress in Paul Haggis' 1993 Canadian drama 'Red Hot' in 1993 with Balthazar Getty, Carla Gugino and Armin Meuller Stahl and as a nurse in David Zucker's sports comedy BASEketball with Ernest Borgnine, Jenny McCarthy, Yasmine Bleeth and Robert Vaughn.

There was an appearance as an English aristocrat who Barry Corbin's Maurice tries to impress in a 1994 episode of the quirky CBS Alaskan comedy drama 'Northern Exposure'.

And while she returned to the theatre, Gascoine also battled depression.

Encouraged by her husband, Gascoine turned to writing three novels - 'Addicted' and 'Lilian' about affairs and 'Just Like A Woman' in which the heroine on her fifties was forced into an abortion.

There would guest appearances as a nun in the CBS TV film 'The Patron Saint of Liars' with Dana Delany and Clancy Brown and the hit Roma Downey CBS series 'Touched By An Angel'.

In 1997, she successfully battled kidney cancer.

And in 2009, she was cast as the mother of Ronnie and Roxy Mitchell in the BBC1 soap 'Eastenders' but pulled out on the first day of filming, only to be replaced by Glynnis Barber.

In 2013 at a gala to raise funding for Alzheimer's, Gascoine revealed she had developed the degenerative brain disease.

Gascoine was clearly adored by many of her fellow actors who praised her for her generosity.

But she was also rightly hailed as a trailblazer.

(Jill Gascoine passed away at the age of 83 on April 29, 2020)