Bonnie Langford (born Bonita Melody Lysette Langford on 22nd July 1964 in Hampton Court) is a British actress who appeared as Carmel Kazemi in EastEnders from May 2015 to November 2018 as well as appearing as Mel Bush in the charity crossover Dimensions in Time in 1993.
By the age of six, she had won Hughie Green's Opportunity Knock television talent contest and gained membership of Equity. Later she trained at the Arts Educational and Italia Conti stage schools in London. By her early teens, she had starred on New York's Broadway Gypsy, on London's West End Gone With the Wind and in television shows including the Bonnie and Lena.
Her most significant success of the mid-1970s came when she played Elizabeth Bott in 7 of the 27 episodes of the children's drama series Just William. It was this that helped fix her in the minds of the British public as a precocious child star - an image she found it hard to shed in later years, despite amassing an impressive list of credits as a dancer, singer and actress on stage: Peter Pan: The Musical; Cats and The Pirates of Penzance, in film: Bugsy Malone and Wombling Free, and on television: Saturday Starship, The Hot Shoe Show and The Sooty Show.
Shortly after her stint as Mel in Doctor Who, this typecasting brought about an emotional crisis that caused her to take almost a year's break from her career. By the close of the 1980s she had recovered her health and resumed a hectic schedule of work, which has continued to date.
In 1995 she was in the news again when she was married to actor Paul Grunert in Mauritius on 27th September.
Trivia[]
- Both Langford and Jamie Foreman have appeared on Doctor Who.