Stella Rimington, the first female director of MI5 and the first head of the domestic spy agency to be publicly named, has died aged 90.

She died on Sunday night “surrounded by her beloved family and dogs and determinedly held on to the life she loved until her last breath”, her family said in a statement.

MI5 paid tribute to Rimington. Ken McCallum, its current chief, said she was “the first avowed female head of any intelligence agency in the world” and praised her for breaking “through longstanding barriers”. She was, he added: “A visible example of the importance of diversity in leadership.”

An accidental spy, recruited in the mid-1960s as a typist when her husband, John, was posted to India on diplomatic service, Rimington rose through the ranks to end up as chief of the Security Service between 1992 and 1996.

After her appointment as director general, she was the first chief of the agency to be named, although no photograph was supplied at first and the only image available was a blurry picture of her in the street wearing a distinctive raincoat.

“I’m proud that I was the first woman DG and that, during the time I was there, MI5 changed from being an old-fashioned closet organisation,” she said in an interview in 2011 as she reflected on her secret career.

In her first interview after leaving the agency in 2001, with the Guardian, Rimington said she was drawn to the world of espionage despite the fact that when she started at the agency “there were all of these tweedy guys with pipes”.

“I still thought the essence of the cold war and spies and stuff was fun. You know, going around listening to people’s telephones and opening their mail and stuff,” she added, though she also conceded MI5 was “overenthusiastic” during the cold war.

Rimington held roles in MI5 units tackling counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, and she acknowledged that MI5 was involved in assessing threats to national security posed by leaders of the miners’ strike in 1984-85.

She was also involved in debriefing the star British agent Oleg Gordievsky after he was extracted from the Soviet Union by MI6 in the mid-1980s. Gordievsky said later he “liked her as a woman immensely”, though Rimington said in a documentary she was unaware of the romantic impression she had made on the defector.

During her time as MI5’s director general she oversaw an agency making a wider transition from tackling the cold war threat to terrorism, and was the first agency chief to give a public lecture to the BBC.

“I have set out in this lecture to show that a security service such as MI5 is compatible with personal liberty within our democracy,” she said. Such was her profile, she was considered a model for Judi Dench’s portrayal of M, the fictional chief of sister agency MI6, in a series of James Bond movies.

After leaving MI5, Rimington principally became a writer. Her first book was a memoir, Open Secret, published in 2001, though there was a furious row about her decision to write an autobiography at the time. Particular objections came from the SAS, and she was ordered to remove all references to the elite special forces.

A series of novels followed, eight with Liz Carlyle, an MI5 officer as the lead character, and two more with Manon Tyler, a CIA agent. In one of her books, Rip Tide, published in 2011, she sent up American officials who imagined that al-Qaida could be bombed into submission.

“I’m tweaking the Americans’ tails,” she said, having previously argued in 2009 the US had “gone too far with Guantánamo and the tortures” in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.

Born as Stella Whitehouse in 1935, she moved from London to Barrow-in-Furness aged four, and remembered the port town being repeatedly bombed during the war. She married John Rimington in 1963 and they had two daughters, but the couple separated in 1984.

Rimington and her husband never divorced, however, and she and John became friends again later in life, living together during the Covid lockdown. “Yes, we argued, but we’ve mellowed. It’s a good recipe for marriage, I’d say: split up, live separately, and return to it later,” she said.