Stefanie Powers spent years being handed a label that the television industry considered a compliment and she quietly, persistently refused to become — the perfect TV wife, the polished, supportive, decorative half of a partnership that the cameras were supposed to stay focused on, the kind of role that Hollywood in the 1970s and early 1980s considered the appropriate ceiling for a woman of her particular brand of composed, classical beauty.

Then came Hart to Hart, and with it the character of Jennifer Hart, and what Stefanie Powers did with that role was nothing short of a quiet revolution — building a woman who was not merely the equal of her on-screen partner but frequently the sharpest, most capable, and most indispensable person in any room the show placed her in, all while the industry continued congratulating itself for casting her as a wife and entirely missing what she was actually doing with every single scene. Off screen the picture was even more revealing — a woman of fierce independence, deep intellectual curiosity, passionate conservationist convictions, and a private life of genuine substance and complexity that had nothing to do with the tidy domestic image the network had been so eager to sell, and everything to do with who Stefanie Powers had always actually been, long before any camera ever pointed in her direction.