An iconic Kingston-born model, who pushed the boundaries of nudity in the 1950s, made her screen debut in the most notorious British film of its era and was the first woman to appear naked on British television, has died at the age of 81.

Pamela Green left school at 14 and paid for her studies at St Martin’s School of Art by nude modelling for artists, before setting up a magazine, Kanera, featuring naked models.

Reminiscing on her website, Ms Green wrote: “People think of the 50s as a period of gloom and austerity – but for an enterprising young woman, with energy and joie de vivre, life was fulfilling and fun.”

Michael Powell, renowned director of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, saw her photo in Kanera and cast her as Milly, a model murdered by a voyeuristic cameraman in Peeping Tom in 1960.

The film was virulently attacked as pornographic and violent by the critics, banned in many towns and effectively ended Powell’s directing career in England, but many reviewers declared it a masterpiece when it was revived in 1994.

A year later she starred in Naked as Nature Intended, which followed three girls travelling in the English countryside before being introduced to the joys of nudism.

She wrote: “The only way to include nudity was to push the naturist movement. Thus, whatever we did, providing we finished in a nudist camp, the censor would allow it.”

The film was shot without a script by a cameraman unfamiliar with his camera. In a last minute casting decision, the director’s mother’s neighbour was included, because she had a smiling dog that could be used in the final scene.

Ms Green was reputed to be the first naked woman to appear on British television in 1964 when This Week showed her performing a striptease, which earned the production company a rebuke from the Independent Television Authority.

In 1986, Ms Green moved to the Isle of Wight with her partner Douglas Webb, an air gunner in the real life dam busters’ raid in 1943.

Proud of her career, Ms Green sold a documentary, Never Knowingly Overdressed, on her website, which included 500 vintage photos from her life.

An Isle of Wight friend Sylvia Sibbick said: “The Pam that we knew was a very beautiful, very lovely lady. We knew of her photos. She did not really talk a lot about that part of her life.

“Her photos still sold all over the world. Most certainly she still had people who wanted her photograph.”