Helen Fielding facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Helen Fielding
Born	(1958-02-19) 19 February 1958 (age 67) Morley, England
Occupation	Journalist, novelist, screenwriter
Nationality	British
Education	St Anne's College, Oxford
Partner	Kevin Curran (died 2016)
Children	2

Helen Fielding (born 19 February 1958) is a British writer, journalist, and screenwriter. She is most famous for creating the character Bridget Jones. Helen Fielding's first novel was about a refugee camp in East Africa. She started writing about Bridget Jones in a secret column for a London newspaper.

This column became a huge hit, which led to four Bridget Jones novels and four movies. Helen Fielding believes the stories are popular because they show the difference between how people think they should be and how they really are.

Her novel Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) became a worldwide bestseller. It was published in over 40 countries. Helen continued Bridget's story in other novels. These include Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2013), and Bridget Jones’s Baby: the Diaries (2017). All of these books also became international bestsellers.

Bridget Jones's Diary was even named one of the top ten novels that defined the 20th century by The Guardian newspaper. In 2024, The New York Times called it one of the funniest novels since Catch 22.

The movies based on these books were also very successful. These include Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Bridget Jones’s Baby. They earned a lot of money at the international box office.

Helen Fielding's novel Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2013) showed Bridget's life as a single mom with two young children. It explored her attempts to start dating again. This book was number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list for six months. The movie Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was released in 2025. Renee Zellweger plays Bridget Jones for the fourth time in this film. The movie is based on Helen Fielding's novel and her original screenplay.

In a 2004 poll by the BBC, Helen Fielding was named the 29th most important person in British culture. In 2016, the BBC's Woman's Hour show said Bridget Jones was one of seven women who had most influenced British female culture over the past 70 years. Bridget was the only character on the list who was not a real person.

Helen Fielding is currently working on a new novel that is not about Bridget Jones.

About Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire. This was a textile town near Leeds in northern England. Her father was in charge of a textile factory next to their family home. The factory made cloth for miners' jackets. Her father passed away in 1982. Her mother, Nellie, stayed in Yorkshire and passed away in 2021.

Helen went to Wakefield Girls' High School. She has three brothers and sisters. She studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford. She also performed in a comedy show at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival.

Early Career and Writing

Helen Fielding started working at the BBC in 1979. She began as a researcher for a news show called Nationwide. She then became a production manager and director for different entertainment shows. In 1985, she helped produce a live TV broadcast from a refugee camp in Eastern Sudan. This was for the start of Comic Relief, a charity event. She also wrote and produced documentaries in Africa for the first two Comic Relief fundraising shows.

These experiences helped her write her first novel, Cause Celeb. From 1990 to 1999, she worked as a journalist and writer for several national newspapers. These included The Sunday Times and The Independent.

Her most famous work, Bridget Jones's Diary, started as a secret column in The Independent in 1995. The column became very popular. This success led to four novels and four movies. Helen Fielding helped write the screenplays for all four films.

The Bridget Jones Story

Helen Fielding's first novel, Cause Celeb, was published in 1994. It received good reviews but did not sell many copies. She was finding it hard to make money while working on her second novel. This second book was a funny story about different cultures in the Caribbean.

Then, The Independent newspaper asked her to write a column about being single in London. Helen thought this would be too embarrassing. Instead, she suggested creating a funny, made-up character who was a bit over-the-top.

She wrote the column without her name on it. This allowed her to be honest about the worries of single women in their thirties. The column quickly gained many fans. Her identity was then revealed. Her publishers asked her to write a novel about Bridget Jones instead of her Caribbean story.

The hardcover book was published in 1996. It received good reviews but had modest sales at first. The paperback version, released in 1997, immediately became a bestseller. It stayed at the top of the charts for over six months and became a worldwide hit.

Helen continued her columns in The Independent and later The Daily Telegraph until 1997. She published a second Bridget novel, The Edge of Reason, in 1999. The movie Bridget Jones's Diary was released in 2001, and its sequel in 2004. Helen Fielding continued writing Bridget Jones's adventures for The Independent starting in 2005. In 2012, she announced she was writing a third Bridget Jones book.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was published in 2013. It quickly became number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list. It also reached number seven on The New York Times bestseller list. By the time the paperback was released in 2014, over one million copies had been sold. The novel was nominated for several awards and has been translated into 32 languages.

The movies Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Bridget Jones’s Baby have earned over three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide. Helen Fielding wrote the first screenplays for Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones’s Baby, and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Other writers later helped develop them further.

Personal Life

Helen Fielding lives in London and also spends time in Los Angeles. She had a relationship with Kevin Curran, a writer and producer for The Simpsons. They had two children together. Kevin Curran passed away from cancer in 2016.

Helping Others

Helen Fielding is an Ambassador for several charities:

• Save the Children: This charity helps children around the world.
• The Yorkshire Children’s Charity: This group works to reduce child poverty in her home region of Yorkshire.
• Ohana One: This organization helps plastic surgeons perform remote surgeries and training in Africa using smart technology and virtual reality.
• She also helped with OxTales, a collection of short stories published in 2009 to raise money for Oxfam.

Awards and Nominations

• 1997 British Book of the Year
• 2002 Writers Guild of America nomination, Best Screenplay
• 2002 BAFTA nomination, Best Screenplay
• 2002 Evening Standard Award Best Screenplay
• 2013 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize shortlist, Comic Fiction
• 2013 National Book Award nomination, Best Popular Fiction
• 2016 (Evening Standard) Peter Sellers Award for Comedy
• 2016 Honorary Doctorate of Literature, University of York
• 2017 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries, Comic Novel of The Year

Movies Based on Her Books

• Bridget Jones's Diary (2001). Stars Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth. Written by Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, Helen Fielding. Directed by Sharon Maguire.
• Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). Stars Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth. Written by Adam Brooks, Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, Helen Fielding. Directed by Beeban Kidron.
• Bridget Jones's Baby (2016). Stars Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey. Written by Helen Fielding, Emma Thompson, Dan Mazer. Directed by Sharon Maguire.
• Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025). Stars Renée Zellweger, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Leo Woodall, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant. Written by Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer, Abi Morgan. Directed by Michael Morris.

See also

In Spanish: Helen Fielding para niños