Private diarist (vg)

By Vanessa Thorpe, The Observer - April 8, 2001

Helen was in fishnets. Dressed as Marlene Dietrich, she waltzed a chair slowly around the stage. Instantly, Richard was entranced. 'I want to be your boyfriend,' he said with conviction. 

'What a stupid thing to say,' replied Helen. 

So went the not-so-legendary first encounter between two young Oxford English undergraduates who have since gone on to sew up the British market in popular storytelling. 

The girl with the chair was Helen Fielding, now a millionaire novelist living in the Hollywood Hills. Her forthright young admirer was Richard Curtis, now a millionaire screenwriter and philanthropist, living in Notting Hill.

Back then, in the late Seventies, Fielding was the star of a student production of Sam Shephard's play, Mad Dog Blues, and Curtis was reading English at Christ Church. Inevitably, the couple went out with each other for a while. More unusually, they managed to remain friends. So much so that they co-wrote the screenplay of Fielding's book Bridget Jones' Diary - the old hand deftly steering the newcomer through the process of creating a date movie with laughs. 

There was a time though, a little after university, when Fielding must have keenly felt the gap between her apparent achievements and those of her peers. Curtis, who was feted for bringing his friend Rowan Atkinson to television screens as Blackadder, soon sat at the centre of a web of celebrity. 

'I can remember,' recalls one acquaintance in publishing, 'thinking then that Helen was almost a sad figure. She was quite adoring of Richard and his comedy friends and yet she had not had much success of her own.' 

But how the tables have turned. Following the extraordinary popularity of her romantically challenged alter ego, Bridget Jones, Fielding has had to retreat into the mysterious world of the secluded famous. She has exchanged the West London flat of her single thirties for a big house with a palm-fringed pool in Los Angeles. ('Which I, of course, love,' she says with a customary put-down, 'being as shallow as a puddle.') 

Out there, in the heat, Fielding is happily conducting a relationship with another screenwriter, known to her friends as 'Hollywood Kevin', and researching a new book. Yet she wouldn't be credible as the creator of the accident-prone Bridget if everything in the garden was lovely. So, obediently, the roof of her cream stucco mansion has collapsed and the 42-year-old author is suing both estate agent and the broker who sold her the million-dollar pad. 

Still it is not such a bad turn-up for the daughter of a Yorkshire mill manager. Born in Morley, Fielding was educated at an all-girls direct-grant school and went on to study English at St Anne's College, Oxford. Graduating in 1979, she won a coveted BBC traineeship and worked in television for 10 years, serving stints on Nationwide and Playschool. She made her mark with a series of Comic Relief films on Ethiopia, Sudan and Mozambique, but hankered after a writing career. An early attempt at a romance was rejected by Mills & Boon with a cruelly dismissive note. 

Next came a shaky period as a freelance journalist - heavily satirised by Fielding herself who suggests that she sent the Guardian an unsolicited article about car alarms every week for six months. Regular work at the Sunday Times and the Independent on Sunday did come along, but celebrity arrived only with the birth of the pseudonymous Bridget Jones column in 1995. 

Like every money-making phenomenon, BJD has disputed parentage. Two of the Independent 's feature executives, Charles Leadbetter and Sarah Spanky, can certainly claim to be godparents, as can the paper's former editor, Ian Hargreaves, but Fielding's close pals Tracey Macleod and Sharon Maguire deserve some credit too. They are the prototypes for Bridget's best friends, Jude and Shazzer, and such phrases as Maguire's 'emotional fuckwittage' were to become key Jones terminology. 

'It started off as a friendship between three women all doing different things,' remembers Macleod. 'Sharon was a TV director, Helen was a freelance journalist and I was presenting The Late Show. 

'Helen has shared her success around. She fought for Sharon to direct the film and that's come out well for both of them and she recommended me for her old food reviewing job.' 

Macleod puts the column's popularity down to the characters Helen created. 'They just chimed. None of these wannabe Bridget Jones novels make me laugh as much as Helen's does. She has got such a distinctive comic voice. Whatever she writes, even an email about what her builders are doing out in LA, is always funny.' 

Fielding's Bridget was launched with gusto on 28 February 1995 - a creation who, though never ever bitter, lived 'in a state of nameless dread'. '9st, the irreversible slide into obesity,' a typical diary entry in that first column read. 

The column was conceived as a vehicle for parodying consumer fads, but readers truly believed Bridget existed. The fake by-line photograph of the newspaper's sexy secretary, Susannah Lewis, cigarette and wine glass in hand, provoked fevered responses from male fans. There were proposals, matrimonial and deviant. When Jones was thrown into a Thai jail on drug charges some readers called for government intervention. 

The comic persona liberated Fielding, and Jones's vocabulary became common parlance. Fielding's own personality was all but overshadowed. Film critic and friend Anthony Quinn thinks this is a shame, since he finds Fielding 'funnier than her creation'. 

'She is quite down to earth and somehow quite unworldly too,' he says. 

By the time Fielding's column was poached by the Daily Telegraph, the move towards hard covers had become an obvious next step. In fact, Fielding was already a published author. Her first novel, Cause Celeb, had won praise but few sales when it first appeared in 1994. A pastiche of the Third World aid scene, the novel's heroine Rosie falls for a dashingly unsuitable television producer. 

'I had made a two-book deal with Helen Fielding,' said Peter Strauss at Picador. 'I took Cause Celeb based on a partial script. When it came to the second book, Helen wanted to use the diary. She was right. In fact, she is unerringly right. The first Jones book has sold over two million and the second over one million.' 

The comic lovelorn theme is the constant in all three books and appears to play through Fielding's own life. Single for long bouts in her twenties and thirties, she has also slotted in a sprinkling of romances with, inter alia, a comedy producer, a photographer and a literary editor. Gossip columnists speculated about associations with young writers like film critic Tom Shone and Marcel Theroux, son of Paul. 

All the while, the Bridget Jones' lookalikes kept coming. Bookshops were suddenly stuffed with literature aimed at the discontented Singleton. An endless succession of jokey novels aped the Fielding tone. We have had big bum trauma from Arabella Weir, My Life on a Plate from columnist India Knight and the fictional tribulations of a number of heroines with outré names such as Jemima, Tiffany and Honey Moon. 

More feminist critiques naturally followed. Camille Paglia, Julie Burchill and Decca Aitkenhead all declared themselves opposed to the defeatist paranoia epitomised by Jones. Fielding pointed out quietly that she had only wanted to show how ridiculously hard women are on themselves. 'And anyway,' she added, 'nobody worries about what Bertie Wooster is saying about masculinity.' 

Fielding's triumph had been to detect a gap between the stereotypes of girl-about-town and neglected spinster; the Singleton could not be put back in the bottle. Critics may dismiss Bridget as a totem of pre-millennial neurosis, but her creator has every reason to celebrate the skill with which she can catch the mood of the moment. 

Helen Fielding

Age: 42 

Born in: Morley, Yorkshire 

Educated: St Anne's College, Oxford (English) 

Jobs: BBC trainee, TV producer, journalist, columnist (wrote Bridget Jones's Diary for the Independent on Sunday and the Daily Telegraph ) 

Books: Cause Celeb, Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason