Amanda Jane Mealing (born 22 April 1968) is a British actress best known for playing Connie Beauchamp in the BBC One medical dramas Holby City and Casualty.

Biography

Mealing has been married to screenwriter Richard Sainsbury since 1998, they have two sons and live on a farm in Lincolnshire. Paul O'Grady and Charlie Condou are close friends of Mealing and are godfathers to her sons. She has appeared on The Paul O'Grady Show on several occasions, sometimes with her sons.

After the birth of her first son, the desire to find out more about her background became "hard to ignore"; she also wanted him to "know his heritage". Investigations took Mealing to New York, where she eventually found her birth mother, a model for Biba in London during the swinging sixties. She discovered that her biological father was a half-Sierra Leonean poet and activist. She gets on well with her mother and takes the children to visit her in New York but her father died some years earlier. She also found out that she has a sister, a year younger, also adopted in Britain. Her sister did not know of the relationship until she was 16, but had watched Mealing in Grange Hill, with people saying 'you look like that girl on TV'. Now close, when they first met their similarities were unbelievable — "we talk the same, walk the same, even our actions are the same".

With a desire to reconnect with her roots and acknowledge her father, and as an ambassador, Mealing has worked with Save the Children in Sierra Leone. She filmed a documentary about Kroo Bay — a slum built on the rubbish discarded by Freetown — saying: "It’s the worst place in the world you could grow up as child. One child in four will die before they reach five years old."

The day after giving birth to her second son, Mealing was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has since made a full recovery. Mealing was asked to be an ambassador for Breast Cancer Care in early 2010. She has developed a close bond with the charity. "When I was diagnosed the first leaflet I received was from Breast Cancer Care. They have been there for me ever since. I am deeply honoured to be given a chance to give something back to them." After losing a close friend to breast cancer early the same year Amanda decided to dedicate a JustGiving page to raise money in memory of her friend. She ran the 2012 London Marathon on her 45th birthday for Breast Cancer Care and finished in a time of 4hr 44min 26sec.