Fay Ripley

Her father was a successful businessman, and brother of 1960s pop singer Twinkle, and her mother an antiques dealer. They separated when Ripley was two years old and both remarried, so Ripley spent her childhood moving around Surrey between two families. She was the only child from her parents' marriage but had several half-brothers and sisters from their new relationships. In her early life, she lived in various Surrey towns, including Walton-on-Thames, Weybridge, Esher and Cobham. Her father wanted her to have a good education so, despite the family's Protestant religion, sent her to various Catholic convent schools around the county. One was St Maur's Convent School in Weybridge, which she attended with Liza Tarbuck. Ripley did not feel academically challenged there, and later declared the school mediocre.<br /><br /> At school, Ripley enjoyed drama lessons, spurred on by the positive remarks she received from her drama teacher Susan Ford. She said of Ford, "When I was 15, one of the few people who said, 'Well done', was my drama teacher, and she was really brilliant. She was a powerful woman. Those women change your life. You always remember them. There was something about her. She basically made me feel very good about myself as a 15-year-old girl." Abandoning her childhood ambition to become a nurse, Ripley decided to go into acting. Her father wanted to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland but, in an effort to rebel from her middle-class Home Counties background, Ripley instead went to a local state college in Surrey, where she took A-levels in communication studies, art, and drama. Read Less

The following year she had roles in the comedy film Roseanna's Grave (Paul Weiland, 1997), an episode of The Bill—as a woman whose nanny is accused of stealing from her—and a two-part episode of the Kevin Whately series The Broker's Man as a police officer. Her role in The Broker's Man was one of the few occasions on which Ripley played a police officer; she has frequently declined offers of similar roles because she does not want to "summon up the misery" to play a character that performs post-mortem examinations or investigates murders when she could be starring in more true to life and funny programmes. Read Less