Lindsay Wagner accepted the signature role of Jamie Sommers in The Six Million Dollar Man as a birthday present to her younger sister. Wagner, who had been training to become an actress since she was 12 years old, was part of the last group of contract players at Universal Studios in the early 1970s. Universal used her in their own shows and, when she wasn’t working for them, she was loaned out to other companies. She had guest spots in a head-staggering round of TV series, such as Marcus Welby and The Rockford Files, and movies, such as Robert Wises’ Two People and the law-school drama The Paper Chase.

“Universal produced 75 per cent of episodic television at that time, so they had great use for this pool of contract players but they weren’t contract players in the old studio sense, when they were into building careers. In this case, it was a very functional relationship; they treated you like they treated the camera, you were part of the jigsaw and that was it. In my first six months at Universal, I did 13 different television series,” Wagner explains.

She describes her introduction to the bionic woman, Jamie Sommers, as “terribly karmic”. Wagner was teaching acting to children in a private school that didn’t have the finance for an arts programme. She was aware of how acting had helped her and enjoyed providing the same opportunity for these children.

“I was enjoying the teaching so much that I was torn between the two worlds – I didn’t know for sure exactly what I wanted to do. Just as the option on my contract was due to expire, I got this goofy script about people jumping off buildings and, never having seen The Six Million Dollar Man, I thought ‘they have got to be kidding’. Except for Star Trek, I wouldn’t have called myself a sci-fi person, so this didn’t seem to be my kind of thing.

“After they approached me, I was talking to my mother on the phone and I began describing the script to her. She said: ‘Oh you mean The Six Million Dollar Man… that’s your sister’s favourite show. You’re not thinking about turning that down, are you?’ And I didn’t know what to say. Then I looked at the covering letter that came with the script and the start date of the show was my sister’s birthday. So I said someone is sending me a message here and I decided to do a single, two-part episode.”

Then someone else sent her a message – the great American public. Jamie Sommers had been killed off at the end of her episode in The Six Million Dollar Man and there was an outcry. There were claims that young people had been traumatised by her death and the network decided to bring her back for another two-part episode, just to show that she hadn’t really died, that they did have ways of rebuilding her.

“That aired when I was in Canada making a movie and all hell broke loose. They kept phoning to say that they wanted more of Jamie Sommers and I kept saying no. Then a friend pointed out how influential a show like this could be. She said it could be an enormous influence for good on young people and I began to think about it seriously.”

Sommers spun off into her own series, The Bionic Woman, and quickly became a pop cultural icon in the US and further afield.

Wagner is in Ireland to conduct two sets of “quiet the mind and open the heart” workshops at Bellinter House, Navan in Co Meath. According to the press release for the workshops, Wagner has pursued a vigorous study of healing and its relationship to human potential. When I met her last week, I asked her to explain what this means.

“It’s really about shifting our perspectives. All the programmes that I do are based on the concept that our perspective of any given circumstance is what causes us to suffer – not the circumstance. What generates our perspective is a complex matrix of old programming. We encounter circumstances that are crying out to have something wonderful happen and this self-sabotage comes up, what you might call this unconscious programme of unworthiness.

“What we do is use healing techniques that dislodge the negative energy from our past experiences, so that memory doesn’t hold all this emotional pain any more – it is just a memory of what happened.”

Wagner says she uses a range of methodologies – including psychology, spirituality and “healing touch” – that are designed to “cut through the major roadblocks to true joy and fulfilment in our lives”.

The next workshop, Enhancing Your Spiritual Experience, will be held at Bellinter House on 20 and 21 June. The fee per workshop is €195 and bookings can be made at: www.lindsaywagnerinternational.com/irelandworkshop