Angela Bloomfield first appeared on Shortland Street 23 years ago when she was 19. Photo / Greg Bowker
Bringing you our favourite features from 2014. If you missed them the first time around, now’s the perfect time to catch up. And remember to come back tomorrow for the next instalment.
Shorty St's long-serving Rachel opens up to Michele Hewitson about her marriage breakup, Botox, on-set flings and how she can whip up a costume for her kids.
For some reason - despite her having been on the telly and so in the public eye forever, and me having been writing
about people in the public eye forever - I have never interviewed Angela Bloomfield. She has been Rachel on Shortland Street since she was 19 (with breaks for babies and time off-screen when she was directing) and she is about to turn 42. Little Rachel! 42! She still looks the same: Very little (she says she is five foot two, but this is optimistic) all over, with tiny hands and feet and features and voice, and she is very pretty ("You should choose beautiful people every week," said the photographer, the big fawner. I told him off but she said: "That's nice!")
She used to be a sexpot. I said: "Are you still a sexpot?" She, like Rachel, can deliver a witheringly cool look. "What do you mean?" Didn't she used to be a sexpot? "Did I? What does that mean? You're talking about Rachel, eh? Not me!"
Oh. Yeah. "Yeah!" she said. "I'm one of the ageing actors." She wanted a plain fizzy water because she had to do a promo shot, wearing a sheet, and she didn't want bumpy bits. She must be terribly vain. I pointed out some little cakes, with icing. She took no persuading. It must be very strange to have had to watch what you look like for so many years, but I don't think she is particularly vain. Rachel is a few years younger; she's 39. "But she's not going to have a 40th, put it that way. Though she should." She knows Rachel is 39 because the producers worked this out last year when a character appeared with an elixir of youth and "they started talking about Botox and I was like: 'Botox! What are you guys doing!"
