Jill Viola Gascoine (11 April 1937 – 28 April 2020) was an English actress and novelist. Her credits include The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960), Z-Cars (1973), General Hospital (1974), Rooms (1974), Dixon of Dock Green (1974), Softly, Softly: Taskforce (1975), Within These Walls (1975), Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975), Peter Pan (1976), The Onedin Line (1976–1979),Home to Roost (1989–1990), King of the Wind (1990), Taggart (1990), and Boon (1991).
However, she is most notable for portraying the first ever female Detective Inspector as Maggie Forbes in the 1980s television series The Gentle Touch (1980-1984), and its spin-off series C.A.T.S. Eyes (1985-1987). In the 1990s, she gave up acting and became a novelist and published three books.
Early life
Gascoine was born 11 April 1937,
Career
Early in her career in the 1950s, Gascoine was a soubrette in a Great Britain tour of the Crazy Gang Show. In 1956, she was a chorus dancer in the Christmas season of The Adventures of Davy Crockett starring Hermione Baddeley, at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin. Gascoine also worked alongside Victor Spinetti in a revue in the Irving Theatre, London. By 1959, Gascoine had taken over from Millicent Martin in a British tour of Expresso Bongo.
Although in her twenties, Gascoine played one of the schoolgirls in the film The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960). While in Dundee, she appeared in productions of the Downfield Musical Societ, and joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre in 1963.
She became very notable in 1980 when she took the lead role playing British television's first female detective, However, during her first day on set, she withdrew from her filming commitments, as she felt that she "lacked the right experience to film such a big continuing drama", so was replaced by Glynis Barber.
Novels
In the 1990s, Gascoine wrote her first novel about a successful television actress in her fifties who embarks on a destructive affair with a younger, half-English/half-Spanish actor in his thirties (based on Gascoine's real-life second husband, Alfred Molina is an English actor of Italian/Spanish descent, who was 16 years her junior), titled Addicted (1994). Her third novel details the story of Daisy, a middle-aged woman who is being pressured by her family to have an abortion after she falls pregnant in her fifties, titled Just Like A Woman (1997). Gascoine suffered from clinical depression for most of her life, which she believed stemmed from her unhappy time in a boarding school as a child. In 1997, Gascoine was diagnosed with kidney cancer, though the disease was detected early and she made a full recovery. In August 2016 her husband Alfred Molina reported that she was "in a very advanced stage of Alzheimer's", and had been in a specialist care home in Los Angeles for more than two years, where she died on 28 April 2020, aged 83.