Mary Tamm

"Your" Doctor Who girl tends to be the one you grew up with. My friend John grew up in the '70s, and so has a particularly fondness for Katy Manning's Jo Grant. I'm an '80s baby, and so Sophie Aldred's Ace should be my favourite Who girl.

But my traumatic move to Australia in the early '90s coincided with a repeat (rare in those pre-multi-channel/DVD/dowmload days) of late '70s Doctor Who, and I fell head-over-heels in love with Mary Tamm's Romanadvoratrelundar - Romana for short.

She looked spectacular (I was entranced by her exquisite beauty, in that particular way gay boys are with certain women), and she was razor sharp, effortlessly cutting Tom Baker's Doctor down to size.

She wasn't a girl, she was, perhaps for the first time in Doctor Who, a woman. She was mesmerising and thrilling, stealing every scene she was in (and in real life, it turned out, not a haughty Southerner, but a down-to-earth Northern lass ). "I never, ever thought of Romana as a sex symbol. Glamorous, but not sexy... An old-fashioned, movie star style," she said once in an interview.

Her death - at 62, from cancer - is as sudden and unexpected as Elizabeth Sladen's last year, and Caroline John's just last month. But, as much as I love those other Who girls, Mary Tamm's Romana was special to me; extraordinary, magical, different. She was my Doctor Who girl, and I truly loved her to bits.

Doctor Who News has a round-up of Twitter reactions from her colleagues.

Read The Guardian's obitiuary.

Mary Tamm's official website.