Patty Hearst won worldwide notoriety when she was captured by a security camera toting a machinegun and assisting her alleged kidnappers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, during a 1974 bank robbery.

Now the newspaper heiress, who spent two years in prison before being freed by President Carter, has made her mark again in a far different world: as a dog-breeder.

Diva, Ms Hearst’s pet, won a medal for best French bulldog bitch at this week’s Westminster Kennel Club show in New York. “I have not completely lost my mind to the dog world, just my heart,” she told The Times yesterday. “It can be very addictive.”

Ms Hearst, the granddaughter of the press baron William Randolph Hearst, who was caricatured by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, was 19 when she was reportedly dragged from her flat in Berkeley, California. Her captors tried, unsuccessfully, to swap her for jailed members of their radical group and then demanded that her family distribute $70 (about £30) of food to every poor person in California, an effort that would have cost about $400 million. Ms Hearst’s father donated $6 million of food to the needy in the San Francisco area, but the SLA refused to free her because it said that the food was of poor quality.

Ms Hearst said that she was kept in a cupboard for 57 days. After that she resurfaced as a self-proclaimed member of the revolutionary group with the nom de guerre Tania, after a comrade of the left-wing hero Che Guevara.On April 15, 1974, a security camera caught her brandishing an assault rifle during a robbery of a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. She was arrested the next year with other members of the group at a hideout.

When she was being booked into prison to await trial, she listed her occupation as “urban guerrilla”. Her lawyer argued that she had been brainwashed by the group, but she was sentenced to seven years in jail. President Carter commuted her sentence after two years and President Clinton eventually bestowed a presidential pardon.

Ms Hearst, 53, a beneficiary of the family trust, has two adult daughters – one the model Lydia Hearst – and lives a quiet life in Connecticut with her husband Bernard Shaw, a former bodyguard, and their four dogs.

Her father, Randolph, one of William Randolph Hearst’s five sons, was valued at $1.8 billion shortly before his death in 2001 at the age of 85, but most of his wealth was tied up in family trusts and corporate assets. He left each of his five daughters $100,000 “mad money” to spend on “something special” within a year.

Ms Hearst, who was played by Natasha Richardson in Paul Schrader’s biopic Patty Hearst, has appeared in several films made by her friend John Waters, including Serial Mom and a deeply ironic role as a kidnapper’s mother inCecil B. Demented.In recent years, however, she has also devoted herself to breeding French bulldogs, with two litters already from Diva.

People still recognise her from her days of notoriety. But her message to them is: “Get with the time, the 21st century. I have moved on.”

She said: “Especially young people know me from the films and TV. They have no idea about the kidnapping.”

Ms Hearst said she grew up surrounded by dogs, particularly labradors. She and her husband have had terriers and German shepherds. Diva, 4, lives at home as a pampered pet. “She likes to sleep under the covers. I put her between the blanket and the sheet,” Ms Hearst said.

The couple also have Diva’s puppies, Bentley, from her first litter, and Enzo and Trilby, from her second. She plans to breed Diva one more time.

Ms Hearst said that, although her dogs’ faces made them look similar to British bulldogs, her pets had “French attitude”. “I take them into a park where there are other dogs; they hardly condescend to look at them,” she said. “They would rather look at the children. Very French. Diva’s attitude in New York was, ‘Do I have to go out on those dirty streets?’ ” Diva was one of 35 French bulldogs in competition at the Westminster Kennel Club. Diva won a red ribbon.

From rich girl to revolutionary

— Patty Hearst was born in 1954 and attended private schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California before graduating from the University of California

— On the night of February 4, 1974, three members of the Symbionese Liberation Army broke into Hearst’s flat, attacked her fiancé, Steven Weed, and abducted her

— She claimed that she was confined to a cupboard and brainwashed. She began making tape-recorded public statements condemning the capitalist “crimes” of her parents, and took part in at least two armed robberies: one of a San Francisco bank, another of a Los Angeles shop

— Donald DeFreeze, the group’s leader, was killed in a 1974 police shoot-out. Hearst was captured by the FBI in 1975

— She was convicted of bank robbery and illegal use of firearms in 1976 and jailed. She later wrote an account of her ordeal, Every Secret Thing

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Times Recommends

• Robert McNamara dies aged 93
• German soldiers earn new ‘Iron Cross’
• Great Barrier Reef 'gone within 20 years'