Wendy Padbury was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, on the 7th December 1947. Initially she wanted to be a ballerina and at the age of eleven won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School for a year. After dance classes and elocution lessons she attended drama classes at a local school on Saturday mornings.At the age of fifteen she wrote to countless drama schools and was taken on by Ada Foster. She left school early, without any qualifications, and headed to London. Within a week of starting at the Ada Foster school she landed three jobs, including "Little Nell", her first television work.
By the time she was seventeen she was appearing in "Crossroads", a fledgling soap opera, which proved to be a great training ground for a young actress as she learned all about TV cameras, lighting, shadows and everything else that went with television studio work. Soon she was working alongside the likes of Norman Wisdom, playing his niece in an early sitcom (she later appeared in a musical with him) and Dickie Henderson.
Her big break came in 1968 when she landed the part of Zoe Heriot in the classic science fiction show "Doctor Who". The rest, as they say, is history! Zoe and Doctor Who would remain part of Wendy's life throughout her whole career and she briefly returned to the show for its twentieth anniversary story "The Five Doctors" in 1983 after appearing in a Doctor Who stage play in the mid 1970's.
After leaving Doctor Who she appeared in the children's adventure serial "Freewheelers" for three years, the third year whilst she was pregnant. Throughout the 1970's and '80's she juggled her acting career and being a mother (at the time she was married to "It 'Ain't Half Hot Mum" star Melvyn Hayes) but by the early 1990's she had become somewhat disillusioned with acting and quit the profession to become an actors agent.
She once said at a Doctor Who convention that the only thing that would draw her back into acting would be Doctor Who and in 1999 she appeared in video drama "Soul's Ark", a Who spin-off video which featured fellow Doctor Who actors Colin Baker and Carole Anne Ford. Doctor Who has never left her and she has recently provided, alongside Frazer Hines, commentary on the DVD release of "The Seeds of Doom".
Wendy Padbury is married to Simon J Gerard.
