Helen Baxendale
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Helen Baxendale
Helen Baxendale first caught the general public’s eye when at the age of 23 she was cast in BBC’s radical medical drama Cardiac Arrest , which hit UK TV screens in 1994. The three series, running over 27 episodes in the period between 1994 and 1996, offered an alternative view of the National Health System than the general public was used to from well-established medical dramas like Casualty: Written by John MacUre, a then practising hospital doctor, it showed senior doctors more interested in their private medical practices than their patients and junior colleagues. Doctors and nurses were portrayed as being if not at outright war then, at best, as having an uneasy truce between them. And it showed young doctors working appallingly long hours, learning everything on the job and having to perform menial tasks that could easily have been performed by nurses. The series also adopted a highly stylised look: There were few outdoor scenes, the colours had a washed-out look and no scenery was visible through the ward windows. It all added to the sense of witnessing young doctors being more or less trapped inside an uncaring NHS system, trying to cope with jobs they were not prepared nor educated for in the first place.
Helen - born and raised in Lichfield, Staffordshire - didn’t originally want to become an actress. Her main ambition early in life was to become a ballet dancer. She attended ballet school but found out in her mid-teens that after all she would probably not reach the professional level she wanted. She found acting a viable option and gained a place at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. After graduating she took up work at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where she worked as a theatre actress between 1992 and 1994. She played in a number of European existentialist dramas and was even nominated for the 1993 Ian Charleson Award for her performance in the play The Soldiers. And it was from this regional theatre that director David Hayman cast her in Cardiac Arrest.
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