Carol Jean Vorderman (born 24 December 1960) is a British media personality, best known for co-hosting the popular game show Countdown for 26 years from 1982 to 2008. In September 2011 she became a co-host of the ITV1 panel show Loose Women.

Vorderman was born in Bedford, the youngest of three children of Dutch father Anton 'Tony' Vorderman (1920-2007) and Welsh mother Edwina Jean (née Davies). Her parents separated three weeks after her birth, and her mother took the family back to her home town of Prestatyn, North Wales, where Vorderman and her siblings, Anton and Trixie, grew up in a one-parent household. Vorderman did not see her father again until she was 42. In 1970 her mother married Italian immigrant Armido Rizzi. The couple separated ten years later. Vorderman's father remarried; his wife died in the early 1990s.

Vorderman was educated at the Roman Catholic comprehensive Blessed Edward Jones High School in Rhyl. At the age of seventeen she went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1978, where she studied Engineering and gained a third class honours degree at age 20.

Vorderman did not trace the Dutch side of her family until 2007 (as part of the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?). It was only at this point that she discovered that her father had been an active member of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation. He died while the programme was being filmed. Her great-grandfather Adolphe Vorderman played a key role in the discovery of vitamins.


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