It was with great sadness that I learned this week of the death of Kate O’Mara.

I first met her on stage. Literally. Barely out of drama school, I was working in theatre-in-education for the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford. We were touring Surrey performing Shakespeare – Cabbages and Kings – you get the picture, I’m sure. To earn a few extra pennies, we all understudied whatever play was on that week at the theatre.

One Saturday lunchtime, when the members of a local youth club had been rendered insensible by our mangling of the Bard, I was seized by the stage manager and propelled into his car as he told me: ‘You’re on!’ We had not seen the play, The Holly and the Ivy, nor met the cast. But I had learned the lines, thank goodness. I was thrust into an itchy Army costume and introduced to a couple of anxious-looking cast members and, like the worst cliché from the movies, I was thrust into the wings. Onstage were two elderly ladies and Kate O’Mara.

I recall entering not knowing which aunt was which and addressing my line to the wrong one. Later I was offered a cup of coffee and took it, prompting the elderly actress to mutter: “The other one doesn’t take it”– meaning the actor currently having his hand bandaged at the hospital after gashing himself that morning. I may have known the lines but my moves were, to say the least, arbitrary. For them it was a long afternoon.

I next encountered Kate when she came into The Brothers to lock horns with my character, the hated Paul Merroney, in that brilliant 70s Sunday night must-see series. Then a decade later we met again in Doctor Who when she played, superbly, a renegade Time Lady – The Rani.

She was a consummate professional and bravely set up her own company to tour Shakespeare, risking her own money to do what she did best – perform. She was one of the last of a dying breed of actors who justify being referred to as ‘troupers’. Acting and theatre were not for her a way of earning money – but a way of expressing who she was. The last time I saw her was just a few weeks ago at a Doctor Who convention when, though frail, she was as warmly theatrical and flamboyant as ever.

The theatre is poorer for her loss.