Christina Noble OBE, Irish children’s rights campaigner, charity worker and writer, is born on December 23, 1944, in Dublin. She is the founder of the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation in 1989.

Noble’s mother dies when she is ten years old. She is sent to an orphanage and dishonestly told that her three siblings were dead. She escapes and lives rough in Dublin, where she is gang raped. Her baby son is put up for adoption against her will. After discovering the state had lied about the death of her siblings, she locates her brother in England. She moves there to live with him after she turns eighteen. This is where she meets and marries her husband and has three children, Helenita, Nicolas and Androula. She is a victim of domestic violence.

In 1989, Noble visits Vietnam and begins to care for homeless children, after a recurring dream, during the Vietnam War. This leads her to create the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation in the same year. To date, she and the Foundation have helped over 700,000 children in Vietnam and Mongolia.

Noble appears as a castaway on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on June 15, 1997. She is the subject of This Is Your Life in 2002 when she is surprised by Michael Aspel at a fundraising fashion show and auction in Central London. Despite being from Ireland, she is made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). She is a recipient of the 2014 Women of the Year Prudential Lifetime Achievement Award.

A film about her, Noble, is released on May 8, 2015. The director is Stephen Bradley.