Caroline Quentin is an actress most famous for starring in Men Behaving Badly and Jonathan Creek.
Childhood
She was born on the 11th June 1961 in Reigate, Surrey, England where she grew up living with her father, a pilot in the Royal Air Force, and her mother, a housewife.
She went to an all girls school which was an arts boarding school in Hertfordshire. Quentin says of her time at school,
"I was chronically shy as a girl and socially hopeless... I overcame it by being extrovert."
Modern Dance
She left school and proceeded with a career in modern dance. Her first professional appointment was as a dancer in a pantomime in Luton for which she was paid £18 a week. She then progressed to performing in summer seasons as a chorus girl, her first one being in a show on Lowestoft Pier. After a while she found herself appearing in musicals, and in particular as a prostitute in the original production of "Les Miserables".
Men Behaving Badly
Even though her ambitions are with professional dancing, Quentin is most well known for playing Dorothy, Gary's long-suffering girlfriend in Men Behaving Badly on BBC1. In this show she stars alongside Martin Clunes, Leslie Ash and Neil Morrissey. It was with Neil Morrissey that she started up a production company called Quentin Morrissey. Its first commission was in 1999 for a Channel 4 sitcom.
She dabbled with improvisation when she appeared with her then husband, Paul Merton, in "Whose Line is it Anyway" on Channel 4 in the UK.
Lately, Quentin is more well known as investigative journalist Maddie Magellan in "Jonathan Creek" alongside Alan Davies, who plays a man who invents magic tricks, who seem to always get involved with trying to solve unexplained deaths.
Her directorial debut came in September 1998 when she directed "Dead Funny", a play written by Terry Johnson at the Palace Theatre Watford in Hertfordshire, England.
Private Life
As for Caroline's private life, she is now living with her partner Sam Farmer after getting divorced from her husband, Paul Merton. She also has a child with Farmer called Emily Rose who was born in 1999. They live together in Marylebone, London. Although a successful actress, she has been known to say that she would give up acting if she could make a living from dancing.
Credits
Source
http://www.imdb.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/liane_broadley/creek/jccq.htm
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/PersonDetail/personid-39569
http://www.mywestminster.co.uk/westend/celebs&gossip-entertainment.htm