Alexandra Bastedo - obituary

Alexandra Bastedo was an actress who secured a cult following with The Champions and spurned the advances of Steve McQueen

Alexandra Bastedo in 1969 in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) Photo: ITV/REX

Alexandra Bastedo, who has died of cancer aged 67, was a British actress and sex symbol of the 1960s and 1970s and won acclaim in her home country as the female lead of ITV’s occult detective series The Champions; but it was in Spain and South America that she had her greatest cult following, known to her fans simply as “la Bastedo”.

By 1967 Alexandra Bastedo was already familiar to continental drivers as the face of Shell’s advertising campaign, her image appearing on roadside hoardings throughout Europe. Minor roles in the spy thriller The Liquidator (1965) and in the original film of Casino Royale (1967) served to raise her profile still further, and in 1968 she was offered the part of codebreaker Sharron Macready in The Champions .

Rescued by Tibetan monks following a near-fatal plane crash, Agent Macready and her colleagues Craig Stirling (Stuart Damon) and Richard Barrett (William Gaunt) are bestowed with both precognitive abilities and enhanced physical strength, transforming them, as the introductory voice-over for each episode proclaimed, into “champions of law, order and justice”.

Though critics were largely scornful of everything from the premise to the production values , there was little doubt that Alexandra Bastedo, with her beauty and youthful other-worldliness, was well cast in the role of superheroine. The Champions ran for 30 episodes, and its influence can be detected in the numerous superhero adventures that followed on American television, such as ABC’s The Six Million Dollar Man .

Just 21 years old at the time of her big break, Alexandra Bastedo initially found the media attention that The Champions proved rather daunting. “I’d led a sheltered life and was still quite naive,” she confessed in a 2011 interview. “An American Indian wrote to me saying he’d leave me his tepee in his will, and a sailor asked if I would post a pair of my high-heeled shoes.” As her international audience expanded there came further opportunities, and by the mid-1980s she was fluent in three languages, with 12 Spanish, American and South American film titles to her credit, as well as a role as compère, alongside Peter Marshall, for the Miss World and Miss United Kingdom competitions.

_{Alexandra Bastedo at her animal sanctuary (JOHN CONNOR PRESS)}

Among her more famous admirers were David Frost, Omar Sharif and Steve McQueen; though she entered briefly into relationships with the Frost and Sharif she was distinctly less impressed with McQueen, whom, she recalled, propositioned her with the line: “My wife doesn’t understand me.” In the case of Omar Sharif the liaison lasted only a few weeks, being curtailed by the actor’s bridge-playing habit, his unruly hours, and his incurable tendency to accept telephone numbers from other women.

The daughter of a Canadian businessman, Alexandra Bastedo was born in East Sussex on March 9 1946 and grew up in Brighton, where her childhood ambition was to become a vet. At 16, however, she entered a “teenage diplomat” competition organised by London Evening News, beating 4, 000 finalists to a role in a comedy thriller, 13 Frightened Girls! (1963) Despite subsequent offers from Hollywood agents – and interest from Alfred Hitchcock – she returned home to finish her education, before the contracts with Shell and ITV intervened to preclude her university career.

Happily married and semi-retired from acting by the close of the 1980s, Alexandra Bastedo moved to Chichester with her husband, the theatrical producer and artistic director Patrick Garland. There she returned to her initial vocation in animal welfare as president of her local branch of the RSPCA, before departing to found the Alexandra Bastedo Champions (ABC) Animal Sanctuary near Pulborough, West Sussex. By the turn of the century the ABC Sanctuary housed over 180 abandoned animals, including pigs, rabbits, ferrets, ducks, hens, geese and turkeys.

In later life she made a brief return to acting as part of her fundraising efforts on the sanctuary’s behalf, with a cameo role in Batman Begins (2005) and a memorable turn in EastEnders and as Penny Caspar-Morse, a former 1960s model known as “the Stick”, alongside Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous.

Her husband, Patrick Garland, whom she married in 1980, predeceased her in May last year.

Alexandra Bastedo, born March 9 1946, died January 12 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10569081/Alexandra-Bastedo-obituary.html