If you know Helen Baxendale, it's probably as Dr Claire Maitland, the star of Cardiac Arrest who will look at her rookie doctor and demand in a grave, TV-drama voice: "What's your diagnosis?" But Baxendale could have been a dancer giving it loads to a cruise-liner of pensioners. At the age of seventeen, the actress had quit ballet school because, even as a teenager, she could see life as a ballerina having limited possibilities. As a result, she found herself looking to widen her horizons by becoming a cruise ship dancer, but the audition led her not to the sun-soaked Caribbean but to Glasgow and Cardiac Arrest via three years training at the Bristol Old Vic.
Three years in Bristol earned her a place at Glasgow Citizens Theatre. At just 22 she was the beneficiary of BBC Scotland's decision to cast young people in mature roles for its Cardiac Arrest series, and became the programme's heroine, Dr Claire Maitland. The appeal was obvious and immediate. The doctor who looks people in the eye and talks sense is the stuff of telly-drama heroes; the vulnerability of her age adds a charm and sexuality that tempers the melodrama which could easily swamp the series.
Sitting in a deserted Islington café drinking mid-afternoon tea,Baxendale wears a no-nonsense greeny-grey turtle-neck sweater overblack trousers. There's no make-up, but she's not a make-up sort of person. While she talks in an accent bearing traces of her Staffordshire upbringing, she fiddles with her tea spoon, stuffing the handle into the holes of the rush place-mat. It belies a nervy quality that you certainly wouldn't find in her television alter ego but, at the same time, Baxendale is not shy. Her conversation is strictly no frills, but mixes and alluring, matter-of-fact modesty with rather more mature cynicism.
"If your character's memorable and it's well-written, you're extremely lucky - and I was," she says of her part in Cardiac Arrest. "I just thank the Lord that I got involved with a writer who was so able and wrote such a memorable, sassy, sexy, cool part." Last autumn saw her star as a sexy, sassy lawyer in the sinister LWT drama Truth or Dare, where she became embroiled in a cult mystery sparked off by the suicide of a university colleague. It was another confident role - kit off in the first five minutes while enjoying a lunch-time liaison with a married colleague, lots of working out in the evening, and a practical, good-sense, good-humoured approach to her work.
You can see the part reflected in the person fiddling with her now empty cup and saucer but Baxendale dismisses the looks and natural talent that have made her one of Britain's most sought-after actresses."People are really stupid," she snorts. "They think you're serious and intelligent if you're a brunette with a pale complexion and a bit of a hooked nose. If you're blonde and pretty, they don't give you that sort of part. It's short-sighted and stupid, but that's how it goes."
But Baxendale isn't really complaining. Nineteen ninety-seven will see her in a raft of leading parts. She plays Cordelia Grey in a TV adaptation of a PD James novel, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, to be broadcast by ITV in the autumn. Then there is the lead role in a Channel 4 production, Out of Line (a drama from Chris Oxley, controversial director of Death on the Rock), based on the true story of an army officer in the Special Investigation Bureau, which should be on air this spring. And a pilot comedy from Granada, Cold Feet,where she plays a girl caught between two boyfriends, is waiting in the wings. More significantly, Baxendale will go through a complete character change for the feature film Respect, where she stars alongside the unlikely combination of Dudley Moore and Murder One's Daniel Benzali as the girlfriend of a street fighter. This time, she has a chance to disprove her pale-skinned brunette theory as she dyesher hair blonde, and becomes a sexy, brassy East End barmaid. "It will be really good," she says with a twinkle in her eye.
Baxendale is too young - and too lacking in ego - to engage in big-star look-at-me posturing, but too old for wide-eyed ambition. She's mystified by hero-worship (although she admits to schoolgirl crushes on Robert Redford and Kenny Dalglish - "I just loved his haircut") and has no designs on Hollywood. "Although if I had a wonderful opportunity,I'm sure I wouldn't turn it down," she says. "Who am I to snub Hollywood?" Later, when asked whether she wants to be a film star, she replies "Yeah!" in the voice of a child asked whether she wants to go the fair. Then she tempers her response. "It's not a desperate desire," she says. "I don't lie in bed at night and go, 'God, I hope I'm a star'. But if it did happen, it wouldn't gall me, either."
Whether Tinseltown could offer her the roles of mature, in-control women with latent sexuality that she's made her stock-in-trade in Britain is open to question. The actresses she looks up to, she says, are those who have passed the age of 30 and can still be "of the moment" -and there aren't many of those roles to be had in mainstream American movies. "They all have a sort of cool sexuality which isn't forced and isn't gauche," says Baxendale. As she sits back in her café chair, her hair wrapped round her unmade-up face, every now and again breaking into an ironical laughter (when she says the only people she fancies are the brothers who are doing the plumbing in her house, for example), you can see just what she means.
Copyright GQ Magazine
Back to: the Helen Baxendale page or my main page
since 19 Jan 1998