More on KentOnline
More on KentOnline
Actress Jill Gascoine, who almost single-handedly put Kent on the map with the TVS series CATS Eyes, has died. She was 83.
She played the pioneering role of tough Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes in The Gentle Touch, the first British police series with a woman in the lead role, and then developed the character in CATS Eyes along with co-stars Leslie Ash and Rosalyn Landor.
The £3 million detective series starring three women was set in the Medway Towns and dubbed Britain's answer to the American hit Charlie's Angels.
The women were based in Chatham Dockyard but for one episode, shot in March 1985, the film crew took over the offices of the former Kent Evening Post in Chatham High Street.
Among the reporters on duty at the time was Richard Thompstone who now lives in Newington near Sittingbourne.
He recalled: "The shoot took the best part of a day as we carried on working around cables, lights, technicians and Jill."
The crew also took over editor David Jones' office and substituted him for actor Peter Tilbury playing an editor called Malcolm Proby.
The show made its debut on Friday, April 12, the day after Jill turned 49. Production work had begun on December 10 with Jill arriving a month later after a stint in panto.
She later recalled: "It was so cold on location we all had to wear thermal underwear. There's a picture of me wearing mine. I look like the Michelin Man!"
It had originally been planned to base the show in the Gillingham studios of TVS until bosses realised the former Plaza cinema was too small. So they set up base in the former Admiral's House.
The series had been planned to be one of the first series shot on video but ended up on film because TVS said it had been unable to get union agreement.
Jill also played Letty Onedin in The Onedin Line in the 1970s.
She was born in London in 1937 and first stepped onto the stage at 15 before landing roles in TV series Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green.
She put her love of showbusiness down to her grandfather who was "something backstage" with Fred Carno's famous touring company of clowns. Her grandmother was a magician's assistant.
Jill also appeared in saucy comedy Confessions of a Pop Performer opposite Robin Askwith, who remembered her on Twitter as being "terrific in every way."
Her second husband, fellow actor Alfred Molina, announced in 2016 that she was "in a very advanced stage" of Alzheimer's disease.
CATS Eyes was filmed in Maidstone and Medway and was about a team of secret security agents working for the Covert Activities Thames Section of the Home Office.
