Posted by Robert Hill on July 05, 2007 at 19:53:30 from 195.92.168.165 user eclrh.
In Reply to: Re: Jenny Agutter posted by John Wilson on July 04, 2007 at 01:39:53:
Jock wrote: "I must admit that I've had a soft spot for Jenny Agutter ever since seeing her play Bobbie in The Railway Children. Didn't she also play the same role in the earlier TV series?"
John Wilson replied: "Looking at her IMDB list of roles, Jenny Agutter went from playing Roberta in the 1968 version of “The Railway Children” (No 78) to playing Mother in the 2000 version (No 15)."
Jenny A. was in three versions of The Railway Children overall. Jock and John Wilson were each referring to two of them, but not the same two.
She played Bobbie (Roberta) in the 1968 TV serial (no. 78 on her IMDB page) and again in the 1970 movie (no. 75) before playing Mother in the 2000 TV movie (no. 15).
The Railway Children is not the only work in which she has played a young role and an older role at widely separated dates. She was in the 1977 film of Equus and in this year's revival on the London stage (which got a lot of publicity because of the full frontal participation of Dan Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter).
Reading her IMDB listing from bottom to top (it's more chronological that way), I particularly remember her in I Start Counting, The Railway Children, Walkabout, The Snow Goose, Logan's Run, Red Dwarf, and The Alan Clark Diaries. I remember thinking, before I had heard that she would be in The Alan Clark Diaries, that she would be the ideal person to play his wife.
Sally Thomsett, who played Bobbie's younger sister in the 1970 Railway Children, is actually about three years older than Jenny A.
The history of TV adaptations of The Railway Children is long (see link below). I have some memory of the 1957 version.