A new breed of TV detective arrived when DCI Jane Tennison walked into London’s fictional Southampton Row station in 1991 and took charge. First of all, she was female, and her subordinates — all male — noisily resented taking orders. Tennison was middle-aged, with the bags under her eyes to prove it. She was flinty and enjoyed a roll in the hay and a stiff drink (or three) at the end of the work day.
Best of all, she was played by Helen Mirren, a respected, 45-year-old theater veteran whom “Prime Suspect” — which ran for seven seasons — made a star. Mirren won two Emmy awards for the series — and Tennison became the standard against which future TV policewomen would be measured.
On Sunday, PBS’ “Masterpiece” introduces us to a different Jane Tennison: The young officer who got her start in Hackney in 1973, a pivotal year in the British police force. For the first time, female and male police officers worked together in the same precincts. “Her male colleagues aren’t used to having women in their world,” says “Prime Suspect: Tennison” producer Robert Wulff. “They, too, are on a learning curve.”
Sexism was pervasive. Jane not only sets out the tea and biscuits for the other officers but does the washing-up — and then dashes out to attend the autopsy of a teenager found strangled by her own bra. This time she’s played by Stefanie Martini, 26, who has never met Mirren but fell under her spell while watching her show.
“I had about two weeks before I started filming,” Martini tells The Post. “I got to Season 4, when I realized I was becoming obsessive about Helen Mirren’s performance. Then I had to step back, because I’m not her. It’s quite sad, but I’m not her.”
Indeed, the Tennison that Martini portrays is naive — only 22 years old but with the same gutsy instincts and occasional poor judgment that drove the elder Jane to speed through professional traffic lights without looking back. When young Jane sees an old woman get her purse stolen, she jumps off the bus and tries to encourage her to report the crime. In the pub with her much older boss, Detective Inspector Bradfield (Sam Reid), she doesn’t discourage his drunken kiss.
“Any kind of average boy her age is not her thing,” Martini says. “[Impulses] like that, you see them come out. She feels terrible about it [and thinks], ‘What have I done to my career?’”
‘I was becoming obsessive about Helen Mirren’s performance … It’s quite sad, but I’m not her.’
Martini beat out loads of other actresses for the role, largely because she conveyed “some of the energy, strength and humor of [the older] Jane,” Wulff says. “Stefanie has a stillness as an actor that you are happy to watch.”
Playing Tennison was daunting almost from the start.
“It was pretty horrible filming that autopsy,” Martini says. “We filmed in an actual morgue that was disused. I felt incredibly sorry for the actress lying on the table. She had to lie in the fridge [before that].”
Martini was born in Bristol, England, and educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. There she took proficiency exams in accents, including Scottish, General American (she calls it “GenAm”) and Received Pronunciation (she calls it “Posh”).
That last came in handy in her next project, “Crooked House.” Based on an Agatha Christie novel, its screenplay was written by Julian Fellowes, who gave Martini a role in his tepid “Downton Abbey” knockoff “Doctor Thorne.”
“It’s set in the 1950s,” Martini says, “and I play the granddaughter in an aristocratic family that hates each other.”