In the following year (1954), Bainbridge married artist Austin Davies. In 1958, she attempted suicide by putting her head in a gas oven. The two divorced soon after, leaving Bainbridge a single mother of two children. Bainbridge spent her early years working as an actress, and she appeared in one 1961 episode of the soap opera "Coronation Street" playing an anti-nuclear protester. She later had a third child by Alan Sharp, the actress Rudi Davies (born 1965). Sharp, a Scotsman, was at the start of his career as novelist and screenwriter; Bainbridge would later let it be thought that he was her second husband; in truth, they never married but the relationship encouraged her on her way to fiction.