Cerrie Burnell | |
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Born | 30 August 1979 Petts Wood, Kent |
Cerrie Burnell (born 30 August 1979)[1][2][3] is an English actress, singer, playwright, and television presenter for the BBC children's channel CBeebies. She was born with a right arm which ended below the elbow.
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Burnell was born in Petts Wood, Kent, United Kingdom, and grew up in Eastbourne, Sussex.[4] Her mother is a dance teacher, and her father a telecoms manager.[5] She has one younger brother.[1] She was originally named "Claire", but started asking people to call her "Cerrie" at the age of ten.[5]
Burnell was born with her right arm ending slightly below the elbow.[2] Burnell's parents encouraged her to wear a prosthetic arm, but she resisted from the start, and stopped wearing one entirely when she was nine.[4][6] She says her disability did not hinder her from doing what she wanted, including "sports, swimming, windsurfing, singing in the choir or joining the Army cadets."[4] Burnell also suffered from dyslexia, which left her unable to read until the age of ten. She learned with extra tuition and the Letterland system.[7] As a teenager, she worked as a hotel chambermaid during summers, and travelled widely, working in a leprosy clinic in India, and volunteering in Brazil.[4]
Burnell is unmarried, and has a daughter, Amelie, born in 2008. Burnell's father, now retired, takes care of Amelie during Burnell's ten hour shifts filming CBeebies continuity.[4][6][8][9]
Burnell graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University, where she studied acting.[3][10] She has performed in theatre in the UK,[11] where she received favourable reviews,[12][13] and in Brazil with the CTORio Political Theatre Company.[3] She has appeared in UK television parts in Holby City, EastEnders,[14] Grange Hill,[15] The Bill, and Comedy Lab.[3] She is the author of Winged - A Fairytale, a play about Violet, a one-winged fairy in a London inner city fairy community, which she also starred in when it was staged at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London in 2007.[16][17]
Besides acting, she has worked as a teaching assistant in a special needs school.[3]
Burnell joined CBeebies' presentation department on 26 January 2009, as a continuity presenter for Discover and Do and The Bedtime Hour, alongside Alex Winters.[3][8]
Within a month of her beginning co-presenting, she attracted controversy from parents complaining that the one-armed presenter was scaring children, and prompting difficult conversations to explain her disability.[9][18][19] She and the BBC have been defended by multiple disability groups stating that the problem was with the prejudices of the parents projected on to the children.[2][18][19]