But when it comes to success, earning millions as a banker compares little with her job at home: "Family will always come first.
"I see the whole career thing as a bit of fun. Family is the most important thing to me."
The former Birkenhead High school pupil is still a driven businesswoman.
A fund manager with Rockpool invest.ments, she has now added the title of film producer to anever-impressive CV. V Interesting for a girl who wanted to be an actress: "Oh yes, I wanted to be an actor. I won lots of cups and things when I was a child.
"I attended all the festivals and when I was 16 I won a drama award with another girl at Birkenhead High," adds Nicola'she also attended private Kingsmead school in Hoylake from the ages of six to 12."I wanted to act as much as I could." But she 'fell in love'.
"I met my first husband at Oxford and he was going to do the accountancy thing in London. I realised if I was an actress I would be travelling all over the place so I decided I should stay in London too.
"because Tim was going into accountancy I thought I would apply to all the merchant banks, not really knowing what they did. And I got the offer of a job from the best one. it'sn't really planned, but it's the days before the internet, when we didn't have internships and a lot of people fell into things without knowing what they were doing.
"I was lucky. "I made a huge amount of progress in a very short space of time. But I succeeded in work by mistake. I was absent so much of |the time, either because I was looking after Georgie, (her eldest child who died from leukaemia), or having babies."
Ambition and earning power made Nicola Horlick a formidable force, but it is tempered by a heartache which hit her hard.
Nicola, 52, lost her daughter to cancer aged