‘Catherine’ is really a boy

Press, 6 December 1989, Page 20

‘Catherine’ is really a boy

PA Auckland The child starring as abandoned baby Catherine in television advertisements for the New Zealand Variety Club is really a boy.

Six-month-old Nicholas Hugh Wilkinson, of St Heliers, Auckland, who plays the “helpless baby girl” abandoned at Pittsburgh’s Sheridan Square Theatre, was christened recently at St Stephen’s Chapel in Auckland’s Judges Bay.

Nicholas’s screen character Catherine is famous as the child whose plight led a group of entertainers to form Variety Club International — the

world-wide celebrity organisation which raises money for children’s charities.

Nicholas has shown little interest in his screen career, however, according to his mother, Amanda.

“We’ve tried to get him to watch but I think he’s a bit young,” she said.

To mark the christening of her first grandchild, Nicholas’s grandmother, Helen Craddock, gave him New Zealand’s first set of silver coins commemorating the Commonwealth Games.