Helen Fielding was born on 19 February 1958 and is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty something singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love.
16 Facts About Helen Fielding
2.
Helen Fielding grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire, a textile town on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England.
3.
Helen Fielding's father was managing director of a textile factory, next door to the family home, that produced cloth for miners' donkey jackets.
4.
Helen Fielding died in 1982 and her mother, Nellie, remained in Yorkshire, passing away in September 2021.
5.
Helen Fielding studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford and was part of the Oxford revue at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival, forming a continuing friendship with a group of comic performers and writers including Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson.
6.
Helen Fielding began work at the BBC in 1979 as a regional researcher on the news magazine Nationwide.
7.
Helen Fielding progressed to working as a production manager on various children's and light entertainment shows.
8.
In 1985 Helen Fielding produced a live satellite broadcast from a refugee camp in Eastern Sudan for the launch of Comic Relief.
9.
Helen Fielding wrote and produced documentaries in Africa for the first two Comic Relief fundraising broadcasts.
10.
Helen Fielding was part of the scriptwriting team for all three.
11.
Helen Fielding was struggling to make ends meet while working on her second novel, a satire about cultural divides in the Caribbean when she was approached by London's The Independent newspaper to write a column as herself about single life in London.
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Helen Fielding rejected this idea as too embarrassing and exposing and offered instead to create an imaginary, exaggerated, comic character.
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Helen Fielding continued her columns in The Independent, and then The Daily Telegraph until 1997, publishing a second Bridget novel The Edge of Reason in November 1999.
14.
Helen Fielding contributed the further adventures of Bridget Jones for The Independent from 2005.
15.
Helen Fielding announced in November 2012 that she was now writing a third instalment in the Bridget Jones series.
16.
In 2014, Helen Fielding was one of twenty writers on The Sunday Times list of Britain's 500 Most Influential and was featured on the London Evening Standards 1,000 Most Influential Londoners list.