Early Life
Vorderman was born in Bedford, the youngest of three children of Dutch father Anton 'Tony' Vorderman (1920-2007) and Welsh mother Edwina Jean (née Davies). Her parents separated three weeks after her birth, and her mother took the family back to her home town of Prestatyn, North Wales, where Vorderman and her siblings, Anton and Trixie, grew up in a one-parent household. Vorderman did not see her father again until she was 42. In 1970 her mother married Italian immigrant Armido Rizzi. The couple separated ten years later. Vorderman's father remarried; his wife died in the early 1990s.
Vorderman was educated at the Roman Catholic comprehensive Blessed Edward Jones High School in Rhyl. At the age of seventeen she went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1978, where she studied Engineering and gained a third class honours degree at age 20.
Vorderman did not trace the Dutch side of her family until 2007 (as part of the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?). It was only at this point that she discovered that her father had been an active member of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation. He died while the programme was being filmed. Her great-grandfather Adolphe Vorderman played a key role in the discovery of vitamins.
Read more about this topic: Carol Vorderman
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“[In early adolescence] she becomes acutely aware of herself as a being perceived by others, judged by others, though she herself is the harshest judge, quick to list her physical flaws, quick to undervalue and under-rate herself not only in terms of physical appearance but across a wide range of talents, capacities and even social status, whereas boys of the same age will cite their abilities, their talents and their social status pretty accurately.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)