Fay Ripley
Fay Ripley
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In 1996, Ripley was cast in her breakthrough role of Jenny Gifford in the ITV series Cold Feet. Initially a supporting role in the pilot episode, Ripley's character was expanded when a series was commissioned in 1998. She stayed with the show for three full series before leaving to take more varied roles and to spend more time with her family. She returned for a guest appearance in the fifth series. After leaving Cold Feet, Ripley played a succession of leading roles in comedies and dramas including Green-Eyed Monster (2001), I Saw You (2002), The Stretford Wives (2002), and Dead Gorgeous (2002). Each role won her critical acclaim. In 2006, she filmed a leading role in the ITV drama Bon Voyage, before taking time away from acting after the birth of her second child. Ripley returned to television in 2009, starring as human resources manager Christine Frances in the ITV comedy drama Monday Monday, and Nicola Perrin alongside Martin Clunes in BBC One's Reggie Perrin.
Ripley's first recipe book, Fay's Family Food, was published in 2009 to a warm reception. She is married to actor Daniel Lapaine, with whom she has two children—a daughter and a son—and is an advocate of several charities and causes.
Ripley was born in Wimbledon, south-west London to Bev and Tina Ripley (née Forster) in 1966. 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".
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. During her time at the college, Ripley performed her own small shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, trying to "bring Brecht to the masses"; she performed The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the 1983 festival.
After completing her A-levels, Ripley sought entry to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It took her three attempts before she was accepted onto an acting course at the age of 20. While at drama school, Ripley lived in a flat in Streatham, South London, during a time she described as "horrible and penniless". To support herself financially, she sold menswear door-to-door, timeshares on Kensington High Street and Oxford Street, worked as a receptionist at a health club, and spent five years as children's entertainer "Miss Chief the Clown". As Miss Chief, Ripley performed magic tricks and painted faces at children's parties. The work paid off when she was able to get a mortgage on her first flat, stating "clown" as her occupation.
Ripley graduated from drama school in 1990. Her first role afterwards was playing Osatko in the chorus of Around the World in 80 Days at the Liverpool Playhouse during the 1990–91 pantomime season. She had ten lines in Japanese. Her next role came at the end of the year in the Manchester Royal Exchange's production of Medea. Ripley recalled, "It was only my second job, and I took it all very seriously, in my Greek sarong and my torch of fire, having to burble in tongues."
Ripley's early television and film career was characterised by minor roles as prostitutes or mistresses; in what was to be her film debut, she filmed two scenes as a prostitute in the film Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994). In the first scene, her character was strangled by the creature (played by Robert De Niro's stand-in). The second scene featured De Niro himself, though Ripley's character was lying dead in a mortuary throughout. Pleased with what looked like her breakout role, Ripley bought a dress for the premiere, though she was distraught when Branagh sent her a card apologising for cutting her scenes from the finished film. The same year, she filmed the role of Karen Hughes, the sister of a mute character who believes she sees a murder, in the low-budget film Mute Witness (Anthony Waller, 1995). After Mute Witness's British television premiere in 1999, a Daily Record critic wrote that Ripley's dramatic scenes were not as good as her comic ones.
In 1995, she appeared in an episode of Channel 4's Alan Davies vehicle One for the Road and made her last theatre appearance as a cast member in the Bush Theatre's Two Lips, Indifferent Red. In 1996, she had a role in Stephen Poliakoff's Frontiers, and played a club barmaid in Dennis Potter's final television series Karaoke, followed by a role in the comedy film Roseanna's Grave (Paul Weiland, 1997), as well as 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 to play similar characters because she does not want to "summon up the misery of being in forensics, cutting up bodies or investigating murders" when she could be starring in more true to life and funny programmes.
In 1996, Ripley auditioned for Granada Television's Cold Feet, a television pilot about the romances of three couples living in Manchester. She believed she was reading for the role of Rachel, the "young, pretty one", and was surprised to discover that she was wanted for Jenny, the "northern housewife". In the audition, she performed with an inelegant approximation of a local Manchester accent. The producers found her approach to the role refreshing from other actresses, who were seen as too "finger-wagging". Ripley won the role, and appeared opposite John Thomson and James Nesbitt in the programme. After the pilot won an award, ITV's director of programmes commissioned a series of Cold Feet, so Ripley worked on improving her character's accent by speaking to locals and mimicking their speech. Her supporting character from the pilot episode was given a bigger role in the series; in the first episode (broadcast in 1998), Jenny gives birth to her first child. At that time, Ripley had never experienced childbirth, so copied birth scenes she had seen in other television series. An Independent review of the first series in November 1998 noted, "Fay Ripley has a range of quirky mannerisms that are more reminiscent of Elaine in Seinfeld than of any other Brit-com woman." The character also gained Ripley public recognition; after being noticed by a member of staff in Marks & Spencer, she was so pleased that she invited the woman to dinner.
Ripley's performance in the first series won her a nomination for Best TV Comedy Actress at the British Comedy Awards 1999. For her performance in the third series (2000), in which her character separates from her husband and dates another man (played by Ben Miles), she was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress, making her the only Cold Feet cast member to be nominated for a BAFTA award for their role in the series. During pre-production of the fourth series (2001), Ripley announced to the producers that she would be leaving the show, partly because she did not want to spend five months living in Manchester away from her home in London and wanted to spend more time with her husband, and partly to take other roles which she would otherwise not be able to do. She asked the writer Mike Bullen to either kill off Jenny or have her lose a limb. Bullen refused and instead wrote a plot in which Jenny moves to New York. Ripley returned to the series for a guest appearance in the final episode (2003). She had originally planned not to return to the show, but reprised the role so she could have an on-screen record of the final stages of her pregnancy with her first child.
Ripley's first recipe book, Fay's Family Food, was published in 2009 to a warm reception. She is married to actor Daniel Lapaine, with whom she has two children—a daughter and a son—and is an advocate of several charities and causes.
Ripley was born in Wimbledon, south-west London to Bev and Tina Ripley (née Forster) in 1966. 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".
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. During her time at the college, Ripley performed her own small shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, trying to "bring Brecht to the masses"; she performed The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the 1983 festival.
After completing her A-levels, Ripley sought entry to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It took her three attempts before she was accepted onto an acting course at the age of 20. While at drama school, Ripley lived in a flat in Streatham, South London, during a time she described as "horrible and penniless". To support herself financially, she sold menswear door-to-door, timeshares on Kensington High Street and Oxford Street, worked as a receptionist at a health club, and spent five years as children's entertainer "Miss Chief the Clown". As Miss Chief, Ripley performed magic tricks and painted faces at children's parties. The work paid off when she was able to get a mortgage on her first flat, stating "clown" as her occupation.
Ripley graduated from drama school in 1990. Her first role afterwards was playing Osatko in the chorus of Around the World in 80 Days at the Liverpool Playhouse during the 1990–91 pantomime season. She had ten lines in Japanese. Her next role came at the end of the year in the Manchester Royal Exchange's production of Medea. Ripley recalled, "It was only my second job, and I took it all very seriously, in my Greek sarong and my torch of fire, having to burble in tongues."
Ripley's early television and film career was characterised by minor roles as prostitutes or mistresses; in what was to be her film debut, she filmed two scenes as a prostitute in the film Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994). In the first scene, her character was strangled by the creature (played by Robert De Niro's stand-in). The second scene featured De Niro himself, though Ripley's character was lying dead in a mortuary throughout. Pleased with what looked like her breakout role, Ripley bought a dress for the premiere, though she was distraught when Branagh sent her a card apologising for cutting her scenes from the finished film. The same year, she filmed the role of Karen Hughes, the sister of a mute character who believes she sees a murder, in the low-budget film Mute Witness (Anthony Waller, 1995). After Mute Witness's British television premiere in 1999, a Daily Record critic wrote that Ripley's dramatic scenes were not as good as her comic ones.
In 1995, she appeared in an episode of Channel 4's Alan Davies vehicle One for the Road and made her last theatre appearance as a cast member in the Bush Theatre's Two Lips, Indifferent Red. In 1996, she had a role in Stephen Poliakoff's Frontiers, and played a club barmaid in Dennis Potter's final television series Karaoke, followed by a role in the comedy film Roseanna's Grave (Paul Weiland, 1997), as well as 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 to play similar characters because she does not want to "summon up the misery of being in forensics, cutting up bodies or investigating murders" when she could be starring in more true to life and funny programmes.
In 1996, Ripley auditioned for Granada Television's Cold Feet, a television pilot about the romances of three couples living in Manchester. She believed she was reading for the role of Rachel, the "young, pretty one", and was surprised to discover that she was wanted for Jenny, the "northern housewife". In the audition, she performed with an inelegant approximation of a local Manchester accent. The producers found her approach to the role refreshing from other actresses, who were seen as too "finger-wagging". Ripley won the role, and appeared opposite John Thomson and James Nesbitt in the programme. After the pilot won an award, ITV's director of programmes commissioned a series of Cold Feet, so Ripley worked on improving her character's accent by speaking to locals and mimicking their speech. Her supporting character from the pilot episode was given a bigger role in the series; in the first episode (broadcast in 1998), Jenny gives birth to her first child. At that time, Ripley had never experienced childbirth, so copied birth scenes she had seen in other television series. An Independent review of the first series in November 1998 noted, "Fay Ripley has a range of quirky mannerisms that are more reminiscent of Elaine in Seinfeld than of any other Brit-com woman." The character also gained Ripley public recognition; after being noticed by a member of staff in Marks & Spencer, she was so pleased that she invited the woman to dinner.
Ripley's performance in the first series won her a nomination for Best TV Comedy Actress at the British Comedy Awards 1999. For her performance in the third series (2000), in which her character separates from her husband and dates another man (played by Ben Miles), she was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress, making her the only Cold Feet cast member to be nominated for a BAFTA award for their role in the series. During pre-production of the fourth series (2001), Ripley announced to the producers that she would be leaving the show, partly because she did not want to spend five months living in Manchester away from her home in London and wanted to spend more time with her husband, and partly to take other roles which she would otherwise not be able to do. She asked the writer Mike Bullen to either kill off Jenny or have her lose a limb. Bullen refused and instead wrote a plot in which Jenny moves to New York. Ripley returned to the series for a guest appearance in the final episode (2003). She had originally planned not to return to the show, but reprised the role so she could have an on-screen record of the final stages of her pregnancy with her first child.
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