SABRINA BARTLETT
BUDDING STAR
The actress on rebooting Catherine Zeta-Jones’s famous role and rediscovering her own idyllic childhood in the countryside
CULTURE
It was the romantic TV comedy that propelled Catherine Zeta-Jones to stardom, and now Sabrina Bartlett is following in her footsteps as the beguiling Mariette in The Larkins, an adaptation of HE Bates’s The Darling Buds of May.
However, the 30-year-old actress reveals that she decided not to watch the Hollywood star in the hit 1990s ITV series while preparing for her role. “I’d never seen Darling Buds and when I auditioned for the part; I didn’t look at photos or the show as I wanted to give it my own interpretation,” she says. “At some point I would love to revisit it, but I found it really useful while we were filming not to have someone else’s view of Mariette in my head.”