[4] She appears in 1962 in the TV series Sir Francis Drake as Yana, a South American tribal native whose tribe is enslaved by the Spanish.

[6] There followed a number of period roles, including the heroine in The Wrong Box (1966); The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969); The Raging Moon (1971), as a young woman in a wheelchair; and International Velvet (1978).

[4] In his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade, scriptwriter William Goldman was critical of the fact that Forbes cast his wife (then in her early forties) as Carol, one of the robotic spouses in The Stepford Wives, and revealed that it led to a major rift between them.

In Goldman's original script (of which, he claimed, about 75% was re-written by Forbes), the android replacement wives were meant to be like (Playboy) "Playmates come to life", the acme of youth and beauty, dressed in skimpy tennis shorts and T-shirts.

Although Goldman conceded that Newman was both a good actress and attractive, she clearly did not fit his conception of the part ("a sex bomb she isn't"), and he objected to Forbes's decision to change the appearance of the 'wives' (making them older, more demure and much more conservatively dressed), expressing the view that Newman's casting "destroyed the reality of a story that was only precariously real to begin with".

[7] Newman is from a variety background, acting on stage and also appearing in television advertisements, including for Fairy Liquid.

[citation needed] Newman is the author of thirty children's books and six cookery books; winning a Cookbook of the Year Award with The Summer Cookbook, and presented a children's television cookery programme, Fun Food Factory (1976), she appeared in the 1980s on TV-am, cooking during the show.