Helen Victoria Baxendale is an English actress of stage and television, known for her roles as Rachel in the British comedy-dramaCold Feet, and Emily in the AmericansitcomFriends. Baxendale's early stage credits include The Soldiers at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre, which earned her a 1993 Ian Charleson Award nomination. Her other television credits include Cardiac Arrest, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, , Cuckoo, and Noughts + Crosses.
Via her work at Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, she was cast in hospital TV seriesCardiac Arrest, though it was not her first television role. Her performance as Dr Claire Maitland earned her a Scottish BAFTA nomination in 1995. She was one of the stars of the popular TV series Cold Feet, playing Rachel Bradley, a role which garnered her a British Comedy Award nomination in 1997 in the pilot episode. She also starred in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, playing Cordelia Gray, and made notable recurring appearances on the American seriesFriends as Ross Geller's girlfriend, wife and finally ex-wife Emily Waltham, which gave her wide exposure on American network television. Other notable roles include Lorna Johnson in Truth or Dare, Caroline Meagher in The Investigator, and Julie Matthews in Curt Truninger's Dead by Monday. She was nominated for another Scottish BAFTA in 1997 for her role as Lorna Johnson. Dead by Monday won the Angel Award for Best Film at the Monaco International Film Festival in 2003 and the Portland Festival of World Cinema award for best feature film in 2001. She played Pandora Braithwaite in in 2001 and "Maggie" in the multiple award-winning Bolse Vita. She also appeared in Saving Nellie, a physics programme running on Teachers TV. In 2007 to January 2008 she starred in Swimming with Sharks alongside Christian Slater at London's Vaudeville Theatre. In 2008 and 2009 she has also appeared in several TV adverts for Morrisons, a British supermarket chain. In January 2011, she co-starred with Trevor Eve in the three-part ITV drama Kidnap and Ransom, filmed on location in South Africa. Later in the same year, she starred as DCI Marion Bettany in Val McDermid's radio crime drama Village SOS. In 2010 Helen Baxendale appeared in the pilot episode of Dirk Gently as Susan Harmison. In 2012 she reprised her role in the second episode of the commissioned first and only series. She then appeared in the Inspector George Gently episode "The Lost Child" alongside Mark Gatiss. From 2012 to 2019 she starred in Cuckoo as Lorna, the mother in-law of the titular Dale 'Cuckoo' Ashbrick. Then in 2020 she played housekeeper Meggie McGregor in Noughts + Crosses.
Baxendale has been with her boyfriend David L. Williams since her Glasgow days and together they have three children, Her first pregnancy was written into An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and her second was written into the fourth series of Cold Feet. Her first pregnancy meant that her character was written out of Friends earlier than the writers had originally intended. Baxendale appeared in only 14 episodes, despite her character dating, marrying, and then divorcing Ross Geller, one of the show's main characters.
