Helen George
Helen George is an actor, born 1984.
Helen George has spent nearly all of her screen career inside one show, which is a career shape British television used to produce far more often than it does now. Before it she was credited simply as "Blonde" in the 2011 Three Musketeers. Since 2012 she has played Trixie Franklin, later Trixie, Lady Aylward, on the BBC's Call the Midwife, and that is the body of work.
Trixie is the hardest of those parts to get right. She is written as the glamorous one, which makes her the character most likely to slide into decoration, and George keeps her a nurse first and an ornament never. The performance has absorbed the show's darker material without losing the brightness that makes it land, and across that many series the character has been allowed to change more than long-running television characters usually are.
Away from it she is a stage performer as much as a screen one. She was nominated for a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album for her contribution to the Cinderella cast recording, and she competed on Strictly Come Dancing in 2015 with Aljaz Skorjanec, finishing sixth.
Movies (1)
TV (2)
Where to start with Helen George
There is only one place to start and it is Call the Midwife, from series one rather than from a random later episode, because the show earns its effects slowly and Trixie reads better against the rest of the house. If you want a sense of how far the part travels, the early series and the recent ones barely look like the same woman, which is the strongest argument for George as an actor rather than a fixture.
The rest of the screen work is slight. The Three Musketeers is a blink-and-miss-it credit in a big silly swashbuckler, and Celebrity Catchphrase is a game show. Her serious work outside the BBC has been on stage and on cast recordings, so the theatre is where to follow her next.