Agent Triple P was sorry to hear of the death of actress and animal campaigner Alexandra Bastedo last weekend.
One of the most beautiful women to appear on TV (actually, one of the most beautiful women to appear anywhere) she was most famous, and best remembered by Agent Triple P, for her appearance as Sharon Macready in the ITC thriller The Champions in 1968.
Born in Hove, on the south coast of England, she got her first film role by winning a competition when she was sixteen. She flew to Hollywood to make the film The Candy Web (1965) and Alfred Hitchcock offered her work but her parents made her return to school. She was due to go to university but picked up some minor TV roles in her gap year so decided to stick with acting.
Casino Royale
In 1967 she had a brief role in the alternative James Bond film Casino Royale starring David Niven.
AT the age of twenty she was cast in The Champions where she was part of a team of agents working for the Nemesis organisation. During a mission they crash land in Tibet and are given enhanced human powers by mysterious monks. In the series, Miss Bastedo always looked very much like an enhanced human.
Unlike, for example, the later The Persuaders from the same company, The Champions was a low budget effort with no location shooting at all. Miss Bastedo, however, always looked luminous in every episode in a collection of a la mode clothing.
Unlike, for example, the later The Persuaders from the same company, The Champions was a low budget effort with no location shooting at all. Miss Bastedo, however, always looked luminous in every episode in a collection of a la mode clothing.
The series was particularly popular in Spanish speaking countries and as a result Alexandra appeared in a number of Spanish speaking films; eventually earning to speak Spanish fluently (as well as Italian and French).
Pirelli Calendar
In 1970 she appeared in the famous Pirelli Calendar photographed by Francis Giacobetti. Famously she refused to take off her clothes for the shoot.
Stigma
Her shyness seemed to have disappeared by the time she made a series of films in Spain during the seventies and early eighties. Including Stigma (1980) by the Spanish director of cult British horror Vampyres (1974), which starred Playboy Playmate Anulka Dziubinska.
With Brian Blessed (playing a Cypriot!) in The Aphrodite Inheritance
Triple P also remembers her in the effective and unusual Cyprus-set British TV thriller The Aphrodite Inheritance 1979).
Eventually, fed up with all the travelling, she settled down, cut right back on her TV work and married theatre director Patrick Garland. who had a long association with Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex. Her final screen credit was a tiny part in Batman Begins (2005).
Always interested in animal welfare she set up the ABC Animal Sanctuary in Sussex. Over the last few years she had been struggling against; cancer, the appearance of which she blamed on taking two many fertility pills in her thirties as she tried, unsuccessfully, for a child.
Still stunning in her sixties
By all accounts she was a woman who was as intelligent, cultured and compassionate as she was beautiful. She was 67.
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