Geburtstag: 22. April 1948
Geburtsort: London, England, United Kingdom
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Carol Drinkwater |
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Geburtstag: 22. April 1948 Geburtsort: London, England, United Kingdom |
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Carol kam als Tochter einer Krankenschwester und einem Theateragenten zur Welt. Nach dem Besuch der "Central School of Speech and Drama" spielte Carol zunächst Theater, u.a. am National Theater. Danach wechselte sie zu Film (Ihre erste Rolle spielte sie im Kultstreifen von Stanley Kubrick: Uhrwerk Orange) und Fernsehen.
Nebenbei war (und ist) sie Schriftstellerin. Für ihre Rolle als Helen Alderson in "All Creatures Great And Small"
gewann sie den "TV Personality of the Year". Ihr Kinderbuch "The Haunted School" wurde verfilmt - mit ihr in der Hauptrolle - und lief auch schon im deutschen Fernsehen. Der Film gewann den "Chicago Film Festival Gold Award" in der Rubrik Kinderfilme. Immer wieder wurde ich gefragt, warum Carol aus der Serie "ausgestiegen" war und fand zunächst folgende Thesen:
Nun dürfte klar sein, daß Helen wohl nicht ganz freiwillig selbst ausgestiegen ist. Sie hatte gegen Ende der Dreharbeiten von 2 Serien-Specials, eine Affäre mit Christopher Timothy (James Herriot). Diese kam bei den Fans der Serie alles andere als gut an. Wütende Briefe und "Anmache" auf offener Straße waren die Folge. Hinzu kam eine über 10-jährige Affäre mit dem Schauspieler Peter Firth. 1995 trat sie übrigens in An Awfully Big Adventure nackt vor die Kamera. Aufnahmen davon findet man auch im Netz. Einem Saubermann/-frau Image war dieses alles andere als förderlich. Carol selber hegte zudem den Wunsch, aufgrund der Publicity Abstand von der Rolle zu gewinnen. Das "Negativimage" Carols ist dann wohl auch den BBC Bossen nicht entgangen (siehe oben These 3). So dürfte das eine zum anderen gekommen sein. |
Folgende Filmographie wurde der imdb Datenbank entnommen
Darsteller - Filmographie
Drehbuchautorin
Erwähnenswerte Gastauftritte in TV-Serien
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Der folgende Bericht wurde dem Daily Express vom 01.04.2000 entnommen
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A different line of work
Actress Carol Drinkwater's life took a new turn on a trip to Brazil.
By JULIA LLEWELLYN SMITH
In the public imagination Carol Drinkwater will forever be remembered for her most famous role, Helen Herriot in All Creatures Great And Small. She was every man's ideal wife: loyal and nurturing, sexy yet utterly unaggressive. So it goes against every preconception to imagine Carol in London's King's Cross, or in a blood-soaked prison cell, yet for the past year this is how she has spent her time, researching her book Crossing The Line, an account of young women who have got into trouble with the law.
"When I agreed to write the book I had no idea what I was taking on," she says. "After talking to some of the girls I'd go back home and sink a bottle of wine. A lot of the time I used to cry. I felt so impotent."
Helen was horrified at the number of women who had got into trouble because of drugs and at the self-mutilation she witnessed. Her worst experience came when she visited one woman in Holloway Prison. "She was in the segregation cell and when I went in there was blood all over the floor. The girl in question was in her twenties and she had ripped herself to shreds. The wardens got her into a robe which barely covered her and when I left her face was up against the bars and she was crying. A few weeks ago I heard that she tried to kill herself."
The book is intended for teenage girls. "So many of the girls I met were well-educated, normal - whatever that means - but their lives had been ruined because they had had a snort of this or a smoke of that. I'd like girls to read the book and realise just how much they stand to lose by getting involved in drugs. They are at the root of so much crime and misery."
Sitting in her comfortable flat in London's Primrose Hill, Carol's life seems a million miles from these young women. At 51, she is a glamorous figure with her blonde curly hair and hour-glass figure. She leads a dream existence divided between London and her olive farm in the south of France, which she shares with husband, French film producer Michel Noll.
"I was in All Creatures for 42 episodes and two TV films over 10 years," she says. "And I loved doing it, although the publicity did make me fed up for a while. But I was 35 when it finished, and now it seems like a very long time ago. My life now is far more varied and interesting."
The publicity she is referring to concerns her affair with co-star Christopher Timothy, which scandalised many. Even though he had left his wife before he got involved with Carol, she still received hate mail and was spat at in the street by people who thought of her as "the other woman".
By the time she met Michel, she and Christopher had split up, while another affair with the actor Peter Firth, which had been on and off for almost a decade, was also at an end. "I realised it wasn't a relationship that was going to go anywhere. I was a professional woman and I had been happy like that, but now it was the time to meet the right person for me."
A few weeks later she went to Australia to shoot a mini-series and met Michel. They had a drink and at the end of it he asked her to marry him. "I wasn't in love but he said it was a coup de foudre. After that, for three weeks he called me every day from wherever he was in the world. Then we agreed to meet in London and he was a late because his plane was delayed. When he finally arrived he said: 'Thank you for waiting' and I thought: 'I shall never resist this man.'" They were married three-and-a-half years later in the Cook Islands.
Michel's love gave Carol the courage to combine acting with another career as an author of three adult novels and three teenage books. The couple's only unhappiness was their inability to have children. "It was very sad because I have lots of nurturing instincts, but I don't want to dwell on it," she says. "There are plenty of other things in life. I have two glorious step daughters."
Her interest in disadvantaged girls stems from a trip to research a novel set in Brazil, where she ended up working in a rehabilitation centre for street girls. "There was an 11-year-old girl who aborted herself with an iron bar then found herself pregnant again within months. I thought, I'll never be ungrateful again - and though I do still bitch and moan like everyone else there is now a part of me which thinks a glass is half-full, whereas before I tended to think it was half-empty."
Carol herself grew up in London, the daughter of a nurse and a theatrical agent. Her acting debut was in the controversial film A Clockwork Orange, which has only just been released in Britain after the death of its director, Stanley Kubrick. At the mention of it, she blushes in mock horror.
"I play Nurse Feely and I am topless in it," she groans. "I was probably the only person who was glad when Kubrick stopped it being shown in this country and I'm certainly in no hurry to go and see it now."
The ghost of Helen Herriot has been put definitively to rest.