Best Known As: The author of Bridget Jones's Diary
English writer Helen Fielding is the author of the novel Bridget Jones's Diary, a late 1990s U.K. and U.S. sensation that ushered in a new wave of "chick lit" novels and spawned two movies starring Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant. Fielding studied English at Oxford and worked in television before writing her first novel, Cause Celeb (1994). After its publication she worked as a freelance journalist until landing a regular column in The Independent and, later, the Daily Telegraph (1995-96). For her column she created "Bridget Jones," a sarcastic, 30-something Londoner worried about her career, her tobacco and alcohol intake, her love life and the size of her behind. Fielding took the popular column, added a plot taken from Jane Austen and made a novel. A modest success in the U.K., the very-English Bridget Jones's Diary became a huge hit after its 1998 U.S. release. Fielding has since published a sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), and another novel, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2004).
The film version of Bridget Jones's Diary was released in 2001, and its sequel was released in 2004. Both starred Zellweger, Grant and Colin Firth (as Mark Darcy, a character based loosely on Jane Austen's Fitzwilliam Darcy).
Career Highlights: Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
First Major Screen Credit: Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
Biography
After years of working for Comic Relief in the most destitute parts of Africa, author Helen Fielding shot to stardom as the creator of Bridget Jones, the thirtysomething "everywoman" that stole the hearts of readers -- and eventually moviegoers -- everywhere.
Born in the industrial town of Morley, Yorkshire, in northern England, Fielding is the second of four children to a mill manager father and a homemaker mother. An avid reader, she studied English at Oxford University with the intention of becoming a writer. After she graduated in 1979, the British Broadcasting Corporation's television division offered Fielding a producing job. Feeling that the gig was too good to pass up, she put her writing aspirations on hold to take it. Fielding worked in television for a decade, making documentaries in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Mozambique for Comic Relief, as well as producing news shows, children's programs, and light entertainment. In 1987, she collaborated with Oxford classmate Richard Curtis and writer Simon Bell on her first book, Who's Had Who: In Association With Berk's Rogerage: An Historical Register Containing the Official Lay Lines of History From the Beginning of Time to the Present Day, a parody of the famous book that charts the ancestry of Britain's nobility. Curtis went on to write Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which starred Andie MacDowell as a character based on Fielding. He credits the film's -- which was originally titled "Four Weddings and a Honeymoon" -- uniquely solemn undertone to Fielding's input. After leaving television in 1989, Fielding worked as a freelance writer for the Independent, The Sunday Times, and the Telegraph, composing features and reviews. In 1994, she wrote her first novel, Cause Celeb, a satire of celebrity fundraising that she based on her experiences working with Comic Relief in Africa. The book's critical and commercial success led the Independent to offer Fielding a weekly column. Hesitant to write as herself, Fielding convinced the newspaper's editors to let her write from the point-of-view of Bridget Jones, a female character she had been developing for a sitcom. The fictional single thirtysomething Londoner was an unprecedented hit among readers. Bridget had such an effect on British popular culture that she even added words to the country's cultural dictionary -- Brigitisms like "singleton" and "smug marrieds" became part of the daily vernacular. Fielding, who had started the column to help finance a book she was writing about the economic problems of the Caribbean, turned Bridget's articles into a novel in 1996. Based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the startlingly honest and wildly funny Bridget Jones' Diary took Fielding less than four months to write and earned her the prestigious British Book Award. Two years later it was released in the United States and spent several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. In 2000, Fielding published Bridget Jones' sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. She was also well on her way to transforming the first book into a screenplay, with help from Curtis and screenwriter Andrew Davis (who adapted the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice [1995]). After a moderate uproar over the choice of Texan Renée Zellweger to portray the very British Bridget, the film went into production under the direction of Fielding's close friend Sharon Maguire (the inspiration for one of Bridget's fictional buddies) with Colin Firth and Hugh Grant rounding out the main cast. Bridget Jones' Diary opened in 2001 to immeasurable critical acclaim and earned Fielding award nominations from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the London Critics Circle, and the Writers Guild of America. While preparing for the film's sequel, an adaptation of The Edge of Reason, Fielding also began writing a novel inspired by her experiences in Hollywood. ~ Aubry Anne D'Arminio, All Movie Guide
Fielding (born 19 February 1958) grew up in Morley, a textile town on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England and attended Wakefield Girls High School. She lived next to a mill that made the fabric for miners’ donkey jackets, where her father was Managing Director. Her father died in 1982. Her mother, Nellie, still lives in Yorkshire and she has three siblings, Jane, David and Richard. Fielding studied English at St. Anne's College, Oxford and was part of the Oxford revue at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival, where she formed 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 BBC news magazine Nationwide and then worked 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 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 - 99 she worked as a journalist and columnist on several London newspapers including the Sunday Times, The Independent and The Telegraph. Her next work Bridget Jones's Diary began its life as an anonymous column in The Independent in 1995. The success to the column lead to two novels and their movie adaptations. Fielding was part of the scriptwriter team for both. Fielding divides her time between London and Los Angeles. She has two children by The Simpsons writer/executive producer Kevin Curran: Dash, born in February 2004, and Romy born in July 2006.
Bridget Jones
Fielding’s first novel, Cause Celeb was published in 1994 to great reviews but limited sales. She was struggling to make ends meet while working on her second novel, a satire about cultural divides in the Caribbean when she was approached by London’s The Independent newspaper to write a column as herself about single life in London. Fielding rejected this idea as too embarrassing[citation needed] and exposing and offered instead to create an imaginary, exaggerated, comic character. Writing anonymously, she felt freed up to be honest about the preoccupations of single girls in their thirties. It quickly acquired a following, her identity was revealed and her publishers asked her to replace her novel about the Caribbean by a novel on Bridget Jones’s Diary. The hardback was published in 1996 to good reviews but modest sales. Word of mouth spread, however and the paperback, published in 1997 went straight to the top of the bestseller chart, stayed there for over six months and went on to become a worldwide bestseller.[citation needed] The diary - starting each day with its signature list of calories, alcohol and cigarette intake, is credited[who?] with spawning a new confessional literary genre in the form of Chick Lit. Fielding continued her columns in The Independent, and then The Daily Telegraph until 1997, publishing a second Bridget novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in November 1999. The movie of Bridget Jones’s Diary was released in 2000 and the movie of the sequel in 2004. In 2005 Fielding began the further adventures of Bridget Jones in The Independent. A third Bridget Jones movie is planned[citation needed] and Fielding is currently at work on the book and lyrics of the musical stage version of Bridget Jones’s Diary.[citation needed].
Fielding credits Bridget’s success to the fact that it is about more than just single life, but “the gap between how we feel we are expected to be and how we actually are” which she has described as an alarming symptom of the media age.
Bibliography
Cause Celeb (1994) is a satire, based on the relationship between celebrities and refugees set in a camp in a fictional country in East Africa.
The Edge of Reason (2004), Starring Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth. Written by Adam Brooks, Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, Helen Fielding. Directed by Beeban Kidron. Produced by Working Title Films.
