Last updated July 2007
Category: The Archers
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Carole Boyd is best known for her role as Ambridge's interfering busy-body Lynda Snell in BBC Radio 4's The Archers, a character she has played since 1986.
On leaving drama school, Carole won the Carleton Hobbs Award – a six-month contract with the BBC Radio Drama Company. This was followed by extensive theatre work, including a year with Alan Ayckbourn's company in Scarborough, where she created the part of June in Way Upstream.
Vocal versatility, accents and dialects are her speciality, so, when she's not playing Lynda Snell, Radio 4 listeners may hear her on Poetry Please while CBeebies' devotees hear Carole as every female character in Postman Pat. Voice-overs, commentaries and presentations also form a large part of her repertoire.
Carole's television appearances include Minder, Campion, Hetty Wainthropp and the evil Mrs S Melly in BBC Children's TV Bodger & Badger.
She has recorded around 300 audio books and has won several prestigious British Talkie Awards for her recordings of Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Ian McEwan's Atonement. She also won the American Audie for Landgirls (Angela Huth).
In 1999, she wrote and recorded her own audio book: Lynda Snell's Heritage Of Ambridge for the BBC Radio Collection.
In July 2000, she joined forces with piano duo, The Bibby Sisters, to form the words and music trio, Infinite Riches. The group regularly performs to enthusiastic audiences at music festivals and stately homes around the country.
Carole plays the wicked Esther Hartlieb in the screen adaptation of Cornelia Funcke's children's bestseller The Thief Lord (2005) and is currently recording a new series of Postman Pat (2007).
Carole also delights audiences at literary festivals and celebrity, corporate and cruise events with her one-woman shows.
