She spent her career being chased by vampires, 007 and David Hasselhoff. And she also found time to sing with Cream and Gary Numan. Was it all as much fun as it looked?

One day, 50 years ago, a solicitor walking to work through Waterloo station in London noticed a 30ft-tall woman. She was dressed in an unzipped scuba top and was brandishing a knife drawn from a scabbard strapped to her bare thigh. It was his daughter. “Dad knew I was going to be the Lamb’s Navy Rum girl, but not that I would be on a billboard,” says Caroline Munro. “He said it was a bit of a shock.”

Over the next decade, Munro’s parents got used to seeing their daughter writ large and wearing smalls. There she was on the cover of the Music for Pleasure Hot Hits 11 album, practising archery in a bikini and knee-high suede boots. There she was with Peter Cushing, exploring the underworld, in minimal clothes but lots of eyeliner, in At the Earth’s Core (1976). And there she was opposite David Hasselhoff in the 1978 movie Starcrash, her limbs swathed, but only in cellophane.