Reception
Discussing public reception of her character, Mealing states that: "The response has been amazing - from men, women and children. I'm often stopped out shopping or dining etc and told 'You're so mean to (whoever).. but we love you!' I think there's a little in all of us that would like to say what we really feel, the way Connie does". Mealing has received several award nominations for the role; ranking seventh 'Best Actress' in the 2004 BBC Drama Awards, being nominated 'Best Actress' in the 2005 TV Quick Awards, and 'Best Newcomer' in the 2005 National TV Awards.
The storyline which saw Connie's infant daughter Grace injured after falling downstairs was received critically by The Guardian's Sarah Dempster, who summarised: "Four years after she first dazzled viewers with her ability to smirk at current hospital expenditure figures while simultaneously patronising sobbing cardio patients, Connie Beauchamp finds herself beset, suddenly and violently, by actual emotion when her daughter falls down the stairs. What follows is a thinly veiled condemnation of working mothers and their potentially deadly desire to occasionally leave the house. Can it really be 1985 already? Apparently so". Fellow Guardian journalist Kathryn Flett deemed the storyline "gripping", and commented that "I empathised hugely with Connie", explaining "although she may be tough and cool and careerist, and therefore have her priorities completely gluteus maximus-over-mammary, she's also a Good Woman who Deserves a Break". Flett's overview of the episode was that: "Despite containing so many mixed messages about whether working mothers should be punished or celebrated it would have needed a dedicated team at Bletchley to decode them all, this was top-notch primetime telly - and a tour-de-force from (working mother of two) Amanda Mealing."
The Daily Mirror's Jim Shelley named Connie his fictional "Egomaniac of the week" during her series ten campaign to become the hospital's Director of Surgery, referring to her response to colleague Elliot Hope's inquiry whether she felt opening up the position up to external candidates was a waste of time: "Of course it is. How many incredible candidates can there be?!" Fellow Mirror writer Jane Simon examined Connie in contrast to the "unpleasant rash of annoyingly wet and whispering male docs" resident in Holby City Hospital in September 2008, noting favourably in comparison Connie's ability to silence an entire room with her "death stare".
Read more about this topic: Connie Beauchamp
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)