Biography

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.


The series had a regular cast of three young doctors, Andrew Collin (played by Andrew Lancel), Rajesh Rajah (played by Ahsen Bhatti) and Claire Maitland (played by Helen). As Dr. Maitland Helen played a woman who attracted more attention because of her bedroom activities (usually with senior doctors) than her bedside manners. She liked her profession more than her patients, was never afraid of speaking her mind - but was ultimately fair, despite her tough and abrasive appearance. On occasions, for example in her dealings with a young boy in desperate need of a kidney transplant, she even came close to revealing her more sensitive side. The role as Dr. Maitland was Helen’s first major TV role and is perhaps still her best-remembered role in the UK: “If your character’s memorable and it’s well-written, you’re extremely lucky - and I was,” she says in an interview with GQ magazine.

The part as Dr. Claire Maitland wasn’t her first TV role, though. The year before, in 1993, she had a minuscule role in the TV film The Marshall. She also starred in a short film called The Euphoric Scale. More importantly, however, she made a guest appearance in another hospital role, as patient Emma in the Casualty episode “Give us this day”.

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.

With a strong performance as Dr. Claire Maitland under her belt (she had also had a role as an escort girl in a 1995 episode of the drama series Dangerfield), Helen became quite sought-after for other projects. And indeed, 1996 became a particularly productive year for her. She played the principal part in John Madden’s Truth or Dare, in which she starred (opposite John Hannah) as young and successful lawyer Lorna Johnston, who finds herself drawn into a murderous situation when three of her old university friends re-enter her life and start playing a twisted game with her. The ending is true cliff-hanger stuff. Another major role was in the TV comedy pilot Cold Feet , where she starred as Rachel Bradley, a woman torn between responsible Simon and care-free Adam, whom she literally bumps into in a supermarket car park. Adam eventually manages to win Rachel over by serenading her with flowers, though not in the form of the traditional bouquet of roses.

In this hectic year she also found time to do a few supporting roles: She starred as Queen Elisabeth I in In Suspicious Circumstances, in an episode that looked into a mystery at the very heart of the court of Queen Elisabeth. She was cast as press secretary/mistress Ruth Clarke in Guy Jenkin’s Crossing the Floor, about a conniving Cabinet Minister (Tom Wilkinson of The Full Monty) who will do anything to survive - even jump ship to the Labour party. She also appeared in the management training video I’d Like A Word With You. More exotically, Helen also made her first international appearance, in Hungarian director Ibolya Fekete’s feature film Bolshe Vita.

Set in post-communist Hungary, the film tells the story of two Russian musicians who end up in Budapest on their way to a gig in Yugoslavia. Here they meet Welsh teacher Maggie (played by Helen) and her American friend Susan. Like many westerners they have come to Budapest to experience the “excitement” of post-communist Eastern Europe. Together they savour the freedom from communism. The film won the Best Hungarian First Feature Prize at the 1996 Hungarian Film Week.

The year after she took the lead in Chris Oxley’s TV drama The Investigator, about homophobia within the British armed forces. Based on a true story, Helen plays Caroline Meagher, a military police sergeant who is given the job of assisting in tracking down and removing lesbians from the army. Ironically though, she is herself a closeted lesbian. She is witness to cruel and degrading interrogations of suspected lesbians in the army - and ends up becoming the subject of such treatment herself.

Helen’s first involvement in a British feature film came when she was cast (opposite Jason Connery) as Lady Macbeth in Jeremy Freeston’s Macbeth, an adaptation of the Shakespeare play. Of all the feature film versions of the play, Freeston’s adaptation is allegedly the one that remains most faithful to Shakespeare’s text. The film was a low-budget one, produced by a company specialising in financing their films by offering people the opportunity to invest a minimum sum in exchange for appearing in the films as extras. Although the film won a prize at the 30th US International Film and Video Festival, it never received wide cinema circulation and reviews were mixed.

Reviewers were much more positive, then, about Helen’s next project, as Cordelia Gray in ITV’s adaptation of P.D. James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which served as the umbrella title for what would eventually become four TV mysteries. Having been cast in the role of “strident woman” (her own words) up to this point, Helen found her new role as Cordelia to be quite different: “I thought she was quite an intellectual, that she was an oddly lonely character…I just thought she was a woman with quite a few contradictions”, she says about her character in a radio interview with American National Public Radio’s Liane Hansen. After finding her boss and mentor dead, the rookie PI must take on the running of the detective agency herself. In “Sacrifice” (the only Cordelia Gray TV mystery to be actually based on one of P.D. James’ books) she goes on her first solo case to investigate the truth behind a college student’s suicide. In “A last embrace” she goes undercover to investigate a county-house hotel owner’s infidelities in a case that spirals into a web of deceit, adultery and murder. The mysteries also had a successful run on PBS stations in USA.

It was in early 1998 while doing publicising work for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman in the States that news broke about Helen having been chosen to be a guest star on the hugely successful American sitcom Friends, as Ross’ British love interest Emily Waltham. According to reports, she had done secret auditions in London the year before. The role was originally offered to another British actress, Patsy Kensit, who turned it down because she felt it would be difficult to mix with a cast used to working closely together for weeks and months on end. Although the Friends producers raved about her, there were reports in the UK tabloids suggesting that Helen found Kensit’s premonition to come true and that she indeed had a hard time fitting in on the set.

Being in a sitcom with a live studio audience was a new experience for Helen, and although she wanted Emily to be a normal British girl she nevertheless fell victim to the producers’ instructions of conforming to American expectations of what an English accent should be. With a hammed-up accent that just wasn’t Helen’s, Emily to many Friends fans came across as aristocratic, stroppy and not the likeable English girl that Helen wanted her to be. This fact also upset Helen: “I found it difficult to get a grasp of who they wanted me to be. I thought, ‘Sod this, I don’t want to be playing someone who says, “Gawd, it’s so smashing to be here, what?”‘ - a kind of thick aristocrat”, she concedes in an interview with The Times. There were initial rumours of Helen becoming a regular member of the Friends cast, but almost immediately after getting the role she found out that she was pregnant, which made it difficult to become more than a guest appearance.

In the meantime the 1996 TV comedy pilot Cold Feet had picked up a number of prizes, most prominent among which was a Golden Rose of Montreux. Bolstered by this success ITV commissioned a TV series and Helen went back to the UK to join the original cast for six new episodes. The first Cold Feet series takes off 9 months after the pilot episode finished. Following the lives of three twentysomething couples in Manchester, the series ends with Rachel getting pregnant, not knowing if the father is boyfriend Adam or Kris, whom she married after a brief fling at university and never formally divorced. The cliff-hanger last episode has Rachel heading for London to live with her sister, leaving Adam on the platform. Judging by her performance as Rachel it is clear that Helen felt much more at home in a British comedy drama than in an American sitcom. “I’m not very kind of confident about comedy…but it’s just like drama and you play it for real”, she says in a tv interview upon the series’ US introduction on American tv channel Bravo.

Now visibly pregnant it was touch and go whether Helen would be able to do two more Cordelia Gray mysteries, which she had already signed up to do. The scripts needed to be rewritten to accommodate her pregnancy. In “Living on Risk” Cordelia’s routine surveillance job turns deadly when in the flat belonging to the man she follows she finds the body of a stranger. In “Playing God” Cordelia is hired by a police official to shadow his daughter’s boyfriend, a young doctor who, it turns out, is involved in a ring of baby brokers. The case takes a turn for the worse when the doctor turns up stabbed to death in his car. Although necessary, the accommodation of Helen’s pregnancy in the two new mysteries didn’t go down well with everybody: According to reports P. D. James herself did not approve of the prospect of her Cordelia becoming a single mother. As a result ITV silently decided not to produce more Cordelia Gray mysteries.

Only within weeks of giving birth to a daughter in the autumn of 1998 Helen went to Dublin to star opposite Kevin Spacey and Linda Fiorentino in Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s feature film Ordinary Decent Criminal. Spacey plays Irish gangster Michael Lynch, who has a successful menage a trois with two sisters, played by Linda Fiorentino and Helen. Helen admits to being starstruck by being cast in a film with Kevin Spacey: “The attractions to the role were hugely obvious. From a purely personal point of view I’ve never worked with anybody quite as star-like and famous as Kevin Spacey, and it just seemed an excellent opportunity to do so, and it’s in a film which is funny, exciting and action-packed. To play opposite him…I mean, what a great opportunity”, she says in an interview with OK magazine. The film received its cinema release in the spring of 2000 to mixed reviews. In this action-packed year Helen also appeared in Angels at my Bedside, a short film about two angels who visit a newly deceased individual. There were also reports about a film Respect starring Helen opposite Dudley Moore and Daniel Benzali. However, the film was never made.

After taking a break to look after her daughter, Helen returned as Rachel Bradley in the second series of ITV’s hit comedy-drama Cold Feet, which was broadcast in the autumn of 1999. Later that autumn she went to Canada to star in Swiss director Curt Truninger’s international co-production Dead by Monday. In it Helen stars as Julie Matthews, a suicidal widow who enters into a suicide pact with a young, disillusioned writer (played by Tim Dutton of Tom & Viv). Together they go on the road to the Niagara Falls to kill themselves in spectacular fashion. The film won a prize for best film at the 2001 Portland Festival of World Cinema. At the time of writing the film has seen theatrical release only in the director’s native Switzerland and in Italy. It has been released on video in Italy and in the Netherlands and will be released on video in the Scandinavian countries towards the end of 2002.

A new twist to Helen’s career came in early 2000 when she was asked to participate in a seven-part mini-series to be aired during Easter week on BBC. The series consists of seven dramatic monologues by seven different inmates of a Victorian era insane asylum. In each program, the visiting camera (the audience) meets a different inmate, each of whom, it emerges, has shared a common experience - an encounter with Jesus. As their stories unfold, however, the audience realises that these inmates are actually characters from first century Palestine. Helen plays a servant girl who discovers Jesus on the night before his crucifixion. Going about in the house doing her daily household chores and telling her story, the camera follows her in what seems to be one long, continuous shot: An impressive piece, both in dramaturgy and acting. “I liked the challenge of doing a monologue on television. I thought it would be character-building for me because monologues are quite frightening - you’ve got nobody else to rely on. They can also be hard for an audience to watch because we’re used to editing and fast-moving images. So they have to be really good to hold people’s attention. And I read the story and thought it was brilliant”, she says in an interview with The War Cry.

During the spring and summer of 2000 Helen was in Manchester for the filming of the third Cold Feet series, which aired in the late autumn in the UK. The rumour about a tv wedding proved true: Adam and Rachel tie the not in the final episode. Before then, however, their relationship went through a few bumpy rides especially when Rachel is told by her doctor that she cannot produce children.

In 2001 she played Pandora Braithwaite in BBC’s Adrian Mole - The Cappuccino Years, based on the Sue Townsend book. Adrian Mole, now in his thirties, is still obsessed with his childhood sweetheart Pandora who now sports a doctoral degree and is a newly-elected MP for the Labour Party. Helen herself sported a long blond wig for this part.

Spring and summer of 2001 saw the filming of the fourth Cold Feet series that the cast had come round to doing after the immense success of the first three series. The script writer Mike Bullan got more writing challenges than he had bargained for, however, when Helen shortly before filming began announced that she was pregnant with her second child. Because of the childlessness plot line of series three, the scripts for the upcoming series needed to be rewritten. The last episode of the series sees Rachel giving birth to a son during a trip to Australia. Helen herself gave birth to her son Eric in October.

Back in 2000 Helen set up the film production company Shooting Pictures together with her partner David Williams. In 2001 the company produced its first feature film, the comedy Flyfishing, starring Kate Ashfield and Frances Barber and directed by Williams. Helen is excecutive producer of the film and also makes a cameo appearance as bar maid Sam. Other cameos are from the writers, family of the crew and members of the crew themselves. Flyfishing - an allegory of flyfishing to relationships: waiting for the right “catch” to come along - tells the story of a male escort and the mayhem that ensues when he unknowingly starts dating the daughter of one of his clients. The film got its festival premiere at the10th Raindance Film Festival in October 2002, and its international premiere at the US Comedy Arts Festival in February 2003.

Plans are to have Helen’s current project, Skagerrak , ready for the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival. Danish director Søren Kragh-Jacobsens’s first English-language film, it tells the story of a young drifting Danish girl (Iben Hjejle from High Fidelity) who takes up an offer to be a surrogate mother for the Earl of Glomis Hall, whose daughter-in-law Stella, played by Helen, cannot have children herself. The film premiered in March 2003 in the director’s native Denmark, and was released in cinemas in Norway and Sweden in April. So far the film has not travelled further.

The summer of 2002 saw the filming of the fifth and final Cold Feet series, which was screened on ITV in February and March 2003. Tragedy strikes in the penultimate episode when Helen’s character Rachel is killed in a traffic accident. The final episode of this last ever series sees the remaining cast paying their last respects by scattering her ashes in the Welsh town of Portmeirion.

It was while doing publicity work for this new series that Helen in an interview revealed her intention to quit acting for the sake of her family. “I really don’t feel much of a pull to go back to work”, she said. “It’s not like I’m back for bath time and bedtime for the children. You’re back when they are asleep and go out before they wake up”, she continued. However, Helen has later said that she’s been quoted out of context as regards her decision to stop acting completely. She is tired of big things like Cold Feet and would like to consentrate on smaller projects where she doesn’t have to be away from her family for long periods.

In June 2003 Helen featured as Helen Robbins in ‘Justice’, an episode in the latest installment of the BBC psychological thriller series Murder In Mind. The episode - about a cheated husband driven to distraction when his estranged wife (Helen) takes up with a senior policeman - also starred Adrian Dunbar and Colin Salmon.

In November 2003 Helen came out of her self-imposed retirement by appearing in the play After Miss Julie at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in London. The play - a re-imagined version of Strindberg’s play Miss Julie where the action is relocated to the night of Labour’s landslide election victory in 1945 - is written by Patrick Marber and Helen is joined by Richard Coyle and Kelly Reilly. The play has met with very favourable reviews, with some critics hailing it as one of the best productions of that year .

Towards the end of 2004 news came that Helen was filming a tv movie due to be screened on ITV in the winter of 2005. The film - an adaptation of Gil McNeil’s novel The Only Boy For Me - sees Helen playing single mother Annie Baker who is struggling to handle her son, her work and her love life. The film also stars Patrick Baladi as Annie’s boss…and love interest.

In the spring of 2005 Helen returned to the floorboards in Royal Court Theatre’s production of German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play The Woman Before. Helen plays Romy, a woman whom Frank, now married, promised, at the age of 20, to love eternally. Now she’s back to reclaim him. The play and Helen’s performance received very favourable reviews.

She gave birth to her third child, Vincent, in the summer of 2006. She didn’t take much time off, though, before returning to the small screen in two one-off ITV dramas. The Only Boy For Me, filmed before Helen’s pregnancy, aired in September 2006. Dead Clever was recorded in the autumn of 2006 and aired on New Year’s Day 2007.