SHE broke the hearts of a million teenage girls by marrying Paul McCartney - the Beatles' last bachelor - and endured years of sniping comments because of it. But it was a match made in heaven and Linda McCartney and her husband spent only one night apart in their 30 years together.

During what must have been dark years for her in the early 70s, the sniping turned to ridicule as her husband went solo, setting up his own band Wings and transforming his photographer wife into a musician overnight.

Paul McCartney, by including Linda, had taken a huge gamble with his own musical reputation, but one from which he never flinched. Inevitably, the sight of the divorcee who had snatched McCartney away from the public - suddenly reinvented as a keyboard player and back-up vocalist - was too much for critics to take.

Rude and crude references to her musical ability or lack of it became commonplace. Large sections of the music industry made no secret of the fact they viewed her singing abilities as nothing more than a joke. Indeed, at one stage, there was a ready musicbiz trade in in-concert bootleg recordings which highlighted her less-than-perfect vocal pitch.

However, McCartney, the smartest of the Beatles, was playing to a different tune, one that was ultimately to pay off in a harmonious and lasting marriage that grew stronger as the moans of the critics faded out. He made it clear from the start it was no accident.

On the completion of his first solo album, Paul McCartney spelt out why his wife was there - ''Linda harmonises . . . but it's more than that because she is a shoulder to lean on, a second opinion. More than all this, she believes in me - constantly.''

Years later, in an eerie echo of that 70's interview after she accompanied McCartney on what will be their last album together, 1997's Flaming Pie, he was asked essentially the same question.

He replied: ''If people ask me what our secret is, well it's quite simple. Although guys are not meant to say this, I guess it's because we just adore each other.''

Ironically, although she never fully wrenched herself free from the all-encompassing shadow of the Beatles legend, Linda Eastman was an extremely successful woman in her own right. She was a talented photographer with more than 50 world-wide exhibitions. The most recent took place in February of this year, when she showed her stained-glass photography, an art form that had been dormant for a century, in an abbey high in the Swiss Alps.

Her vegetarian food company, begun in 1991 and now with a multi-million pound turnover, after a number of initial problems has become a household name and was a logical extension to her campaigning on behalf of animal welfare. She notably sent a million vegetarian meals to Bosnia to help deal with shortages during the height of the conflict.

Most significantly - in their homes on the Mull of Kintyre and in Sussex - arguably the music world's most famous couple strove, and eventually succeeded, in bringing up their brood of four children away from the pressures and temptations of the limelight.

Linda Eastman was born on September 24, 1941, in Scarsdale, New York, to a wealthy American family. Her father, Lee Eastman, was a successful lawyer and the family name gave rise to one of the more enduring myths about her - namely that she was a member of the fabulously wealthy Eastman/Kodak family.

As she laughingly told American television viewers during a 1992 interview, the family name was originally Epstein, but had been changed on arrival in the New World.

Despite the family wealth, her early years were not without trauma. Her mother died in a plane crash when she was 19. After leaving school, Linda left New York, moving to college in Vermont for two years. She then transferred to Arizona University to major in art history.

She returned to New York at the age of 21, becoming a receptionist at Town and Country magazine. It was on a chance meeting with the Rolling Stones aboard a yacht moored on the Hudson River that she seized the opportunity to photograph them.

Her pictures sold and her career took off. Working for Rolling Stone magazine, she subsequently photographed the great of the rock world, including Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Bob Dylan, and, of course, the Beatles. She appeared on the arm of many famous stars, including actor Warren Beatty and the manager of The Who, Chris Stamp.

It was during a trip to London in May 1967 that she first met Paul McCartney, at the launch of the Sergeant Pepper album. The relationship developed slowly but in 1968 he took her out almost every night when he went to New York to launch the US Apple Corporation.

They married on a rainy day at a register office in Marylebone, London. Linda was 26. When she joined Wings, in1972 as a keyboard player, she was the first to admit she never wanted to be in the band.

Her overriding preoccupation was her dedication to vegetarianism, coupled with her love for animals and the family. She was vegetarian long before it became fashionable. She declared in 1995: ''I said years ago that we were in the midst of a food revolution in this country but I was wrong. It is happening now.''

She first put her name to frozen veggieburgers and a cookbook in 1991 but, though successful, it was not without its problems. Meat was found in vegetarian pie packets in 1993 and in October 1995 thousands of packs of burgers had to be recalled after they were found to have twice as much fat as advertised.

In 1989, she set up Animal Line with Carla Lane, writer of the TV series Bread, telling people about vegetarianism and animal rights.

Carla was a huge support when it was announced in December 1995 that Linda had breast cancer.

q David Belcher writes: Unlike his former partners in the Beatles, Paul McCartney chose to begin his solo career with the formation of a permanent working band, Wings. There was much sceptical comment when he chose his wife, a musical novice, as Wings' keyboards player and back-up vocalist. Nevertheless, between the years 1971 and 1981 - a period longer than the creative lifespan of the Beatles - Linda was her husband's on-stage support in Wings as much as his off-stage muse and source of emotional succour. However, being a band member can't have been easy for her.

She must have been aware that large sections of the music industry viewed her singing abilities as a joke. For Paul's sake she stuck at it. Ultimately, Linda McCartney may not have been the world's greatest musical talent, yet, without her, pop would have been shorn of some its most heart-felt and unadorned love songs.