By Patrick Cremona

Published: Wednesday, 13 July 2022 at 12:00 am

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Upcoming sequel The Railway Children Return sees Jenny Agutter reprise one of the most iconic roles of her career, with the Call the Midwife star set to play Bobbie Waterbury again more than 50 years after she first took on the role

With several decades having passed, the new film naturally sees a much older version of the character – a far cry from the young teenager who led the cast in the original.

And speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Agutter explained that it was vital to fill in the gaps in Bobbie’s life and explore what she’d been up to in the years between the two films, which are set in 1904 and 1944 respectively.

“It is important that it is the same character, because there are a lot of people who may have seen the [original] film, and will want to know that Bobbie Waterbury actually went through a period of time, and she went through a very interesting historical period of time,” she said.

“She goes through the First World War and the Second World War, she goes through women getting the vote, and she would have been a suffragette – I’m absolutely certain that Bobbie would have been in there fighting for women, fighting for social causes, fighting for families and fighting to make things happen.

“And so I knew that was something I could do, and I could bring her sense of wanting things to be good all the time or wanting things to turn out right all the time to it.”

Interestingly, Agutter says that these aspects of the character weren’t so much in the script itself, but were something she worked on with director Morgan Matthews.

“You don’t really see very much of that screen, [although] we did manage to get an element of it in there, which I’m really pleased about,” she said.

“But it’s always important to get a backstory for yourself, and very particularly for Roberta to have sustained that life in between.

“But I mean, mainly because it is such a small role within it, I’m just there to hand the baton on – I mean Lily (Beau Gadson) is the new Bobbie as it were, leading that group of children and having those adventures together. I was really there just to link the older story and bring it to the 1940s.”

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