CHARLOTTE Coleman, who died at the age of 33 after an asthma attack, was an actress whose personal life and the characters she played were often very close.
She was probably best known as Hugh Grant's zany room mate in the hugely successful, low-budget film, Four Weddings and a Funeral.
She and Grant's character, Charles, oversleep on the day of a friend's wedding and rush frantically to get to the ceremony in one of the film's early scenes, spewing a stream of obscenities as they go.
Her portrayal of the off-beat, orange-haired Scarlett won Coleman a nomination for a Bafta, Britain's top film award.
That role, however, had parallels in her own early life. In her rebellious schoolgirl phase, Coleman had quit the family home to move in with friends and was also expelled from Campden High School for Girls. However, her earnings from the 1982-83 children's television series, Educating Marmalade, helped pay for her to attend a progressive school, Dartington Hall, in Devon.
Coleman had an early start in the acting profession. Her mother, Ann Beach, was a stage and screen actress and her father, Francis Coleman, was a television director and producer. She attended classes at the Anna Scher theatre school from the age of eight ''instead of going to brownies''.
At age 11 she was cast as Sue in all four series of Worzel Gummidge. That was followed by Educating Marmalade in which she played ''the world's worst school child''.
In the drama Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit she played a girl rebelling against the religious fanaticism of her adoptive mother. That won her a best performance award from the Royal Television Society in 1991 and she was also nominated for a Bafta best actress award.
In 1998 she played a school teacher in Simon Nye's television comedy drama How Do You Want Me. It was, she used to say, the first time she had played someone who wasn't slightly weird or very childlike. ''I'm always the kooky girl,'' the actress once said. ''I don't think I have ever played someone my age, straight, together, who wears normal clothes and does not turn out to be a murderer.''
Coleman had suffered from asthma for years, but had never experienced a major attack before, said her father.
She was rushed to Whittington Hospital in north London, but was pronounced dead on arrival. He described his daughter as ''a rare creature who the camera loved''.
Coleman is survived by her parents and her sister, Lisa Coleman, who is also an actress. Lisa appeared as Jude in the BBC hospital drama Casualty.
Simon Callow, who was one of the stars of Four Weddings and a Funeral, described Charlotte as being worryingly thin but possessed of immense energy. ''I believed she was going to be one of the great comic talents of our time, with the special gift of creating her own outlandish rhythms which made everything she said as an actress seem new and original and hilarious,'' he said.
Charlotte Coleman, actress; born, April 3, 1968, died November 14, 2001.
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