The Doctor Who world lost two icons this year Nicholas Courtney who played Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Elisabeth Sladen who played Sarah Jane Smith. Now Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter remembers her extraordinary mum.

Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter Sadie remembers what life with her mother was like.

“I’ve come to realise how important Mum was, as Sarah Jane, to a lot of people,” says Sadie, “but to me it’s still a very small corner of my life with her…When I was born, my mum was 39,” she explains. “She’d already had a lot of her career and her adventures so I think that when she decided to be a mum, that’s all she wanted to be. If we were pottering about and somebody said, ‘Are you Sarah Jane?’, she would just say, ‘no’, smile, and walk on. Sometimes we would watch her old Who episodes together, but I don’t think I really made the connection.

“Mum was such a low-maintenance, natural woman – hair pulled back, no make-up – and seeing her all dolled up with bright blue eye-shadow, it seemed to be a totally different woman on screen. When, I look back on it now, I think it must have been quite hard for her – to say goodbye to it all – but I never felt it as a child.”

You’re probably going to want to grab a couple of tissues before reading the rest of this interview in the Radio Times.

The final series of The Sarah Jane Adventures begins airing in the UK this week.

What words do you think of to describe Elisabeth Sladen?