Helen Fielding - Biography

Biography

Fielding (born 19 February 1958) grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire, a textile town on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England. She lived next to a factory that made the fabric for miners’ donkey jackets, where her father was managing director. He died in 1982 and her mother, Nellie, still lives in Yorkshire. Fielding attended Wakefield Girls High School and has three siblings, Jane, David and Richard. She 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.

Fielding began work at the BBC in 1979 as a regional researcher on the news magazine Nationwide. She progressed to working as a production manager on various children’s and light entertainment shows. In 1985 Fielding produced a live satellite broadcast from a refugee camp in Eastern Sudan for the launch of Comic Relief. She also wrote and produced documentaries in Africa for the first two Comic Relief fundraising broadcasts. In 1989 she was a researcher on the Thames TV documentary “Where Hunger is a Weapon” about the Southern Sudan rebel war. These experiences formed the basis for her first novel, Cause Celeb.

From 1990 - 1999 she worked as a journalist and columnist on several national newspapers, including the Sunday Times, The Independent and The Telegraph. Her most well-known work, Bridget Jones's Diary, began its life as an anonymous column in The Independent in 1995. The success of the column led to two novels and their movie adaptations. Fielding was part of the scriptwriting team for both.

Fielding divides her time between London and Los Angeles. She and The Simpsons writer/executive producer Kevin Curran began a relationship around 1999 and Fielding has two children by him: Dash, born in February 2004, and Romy born in July 2006. However, she and Curran broke up in 2009.