Helen Baxendale in Poirot, Marple, and P.D. James

Most non-UK viewers likely remember actor Helen Baxendale from her unfortunate role as Emily, the Englishwoman so unsuitably affianced to the appallingly selfish and immature Ross in Friends.

David Schwimmer is a terrific actor, and I enjoy his portrayal of the worst person in the series: an academic who dates his student (oof–well past the age, and the era, when he should have known better), a serial spouse, and a poor brother, friend, and romantic partner.

His parents like him, so there’s that.

Helen Baxendale’s Emily appeared in fourteen episodes before the two characters divorce, from different continents. The writers had apparently intended to keep her on for longer, but she didn’t transplant herself to the U.S. and she got pregnant (in real life), so she moved on and the character was written out of the program. The final episodes in which she appears are shot with the characters in different locations, with a variety of means used to hide Baxendale’s pregnancy.

But her work on the sitcom didn’t at all showcase her dramatic and comic range. For that, you need to turn to her many British comedies, including several seasons of Cold Feet, which I haven’t yet seen.

But if you share my tastes, you have a wealth of options for seeing Baxendale at her best in various guest turns and, in two series, as Cordelia in the adaptations of P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin.

Cordelia is a tricky character: James gives her an intriguing back story and then does almost nothing with it; she makes a point of equipping Cordelia to function as a professional woman P.I. and then sends in Dalgliesh to rescue her. It’s rather maddening.

And the TV adaptation is somewhat frustrating in a different, rather arty way, starting the with the opening black-and-white sequence that changes to colour film.

I haven’t located a legal streaming option in Canada, so here’s a likely-to-disappear link.

Overall, I really enjoy this adaptation, and there’s some updating of James’s by-then-rather-quaint 1972 novel. Sexism is still present, in Cordelia’s professional life, but she is less timorous and more confident than in the novels.

I haven’t located the television adaptation of the second novel, The Skull Beneath the Skin, but this BBC radio version is excellent. It is, however, sans Baxendale.

So for more Baxendale, two other options:

I’m watching her be impressive in Curtain, the final Poirot episode from David Suchet’s masterful turn, and the final Poirot novel by Christie.

You can also find her guest starring in a Miss Marple adaptation as well as in such British TV stalwarts as Midsomer Murders, Law & Order: UK, Inspector George Gently, and, inevitably, Lewis.

Amusingly, she turns up as Agatha Christie in a TV film that I haven’t been able to locate. The counter-factual scenario is that Christie has decided to kill of her character Poirot while making some money on a manuscript. Sounds fun! But it’s intriguing that there have been so many films featuring Agatha Christie as a character, yet with a range of different actors playing Christie.