ALTHOUGH it only ran for two series in the late Seventies, Lindsay Wagner as The Bionic Woman won a permanent place in the hearts of audiences around the world.
For girls growing up at that time it was something of a revelation to have a female action hero, very different from The A Team Kung Fu and indeed Six Million Dollar Man, but just as powerful.

And it made an impact on the boys as well, although that wasn't clear at the time. She reports that men of a certain age tend to come out to her these days about their love of the show.

"After 25 years, they are comfortable with the fact that they watched Bionic Woman and can now share what they got out of it," she says. "Many have told me what affected them was how you could be physically strong and still handle things in a compassionate way.

"They say, 'My friends would think I was a wuss if I told them I was watching it but I loved it because it had things that weren't in Six Million Dollar Man'. I've had to wait 25 years but it's nice to get this long-term gratitude."

Wagner, still a striking figure in her 60th year, is over in Britain to run workshops for her self-help meditation and spirituality therapy, Quiet the Mind and Open the Heart.

But in Sheffield next week she is trying something new in offering An Evening with Lindsay Wagner, in which she will talk about her career and conduct a Q & A session.

"People love hearing stories about Bionic Woman. It's pretty much a global phenomenon now and people know about it from the outside and I thought they would like hearing from the inside what it was like making it."

Fans are not just limited to those who saw it back in 1976-1978 with constant repeats and, she reports: "The children of parents who watched it when they were children have now been shown it on tape or have got the DVDs."

As an Emmy award-winning actress who starred in more than 40 TV movies, five mini-series and 12 feature films, Wagner says she has never been bothered by forever being associated with that one role. "I know people in the industry who don't feel that if they are in a similar position but it has never hindered my career or my life in other ways like other people think it would."

It probably helps that she was not drawn into showbusiness for the same reasons as other actors. She wanted to be a psychologist but was held back by lack of progress at school.

"I had a high IQ but I had a kind of dyslexia and couldn't access information from a book very easily. In those days they didn't know what it was. They knew I wasn't stupid and attributed my failure at tests to an attitude problem.

"I had a passion for exploring human potential and chose to do that through stories. Acting was my way into that.

I couldn't go through the college process, so got my education by going into acting and found I had potential."

She had embarked on a career in TV with roles in series like Marcus Welby MD and The Rockford Files before Bionic Woman came along.

"I was under contract to Universal and getting ready to leave when they sent me this script with a note asking me to do a two-part episode of Six Million Dollar Man," she recalls.

"I said to my mother they have sent me this silly script and when she looked at it, she said you cannot not do it because it's your sister's favourite show.

"She was 14 years younger than me – I was 24 at the time – and I didn't know anything about it. I wasn't into those action programmes or sci-fi apart from Star Trek.

"I went back and read it again and then saw that the starting date for shooting was my sister's birthday, so I felt I had to do it. And I brought her down on set for her birthday.

"They killed me off at the end of the episode, so it was all over and I was doing a movie in Canada when they called me up and offered me another episode.

"There had been such an outcry that they had created this quintessential mother figure and killed her off that they felt they had to make peace.

"So they brought me back to life that was respectful of the narrative of TV (she laughs) and when that aired there was such a wave of acceptance and desire that they decided to give her her own series."

It allowed Wagner some leverage in negotiating her contract. "That started the journey where they would allow me to be creatively involved in the story and that was the condition I did it."

She is insistent that while Charlie's Angels and Wonder Woman had the same values as male superheroes, The Bionic Woman tried to be different.

"I kept pushing them to get away from the usual Cold War opposing the Russians stuff and also to make it unusual with more humour," she says. Sadly, the show was cancelled before its impact around the world was realised.

In her subsequent career she chose her parts carefully, taking into consideration the effect they would have on the audience, and using her position as a public figure to highlight issues important to her.

As a result she calculates that 70% of the 40 TV films were true-life stories.

"Expressing human potential through drama has always been what's driven me. It's become a smaller area because these days there is so much reality TV and what drama there is tends to be dark and violent."

An Evening With Lindsay Wagner is at the Royal Victoria Holiday Inn on Tuesday. Tickets at £22 are available via 07846 636920, 01642 472744 or www.llindsaywagnerinternational.com

Ian Soutar