Jenny Agutter – 'One's own life as an actor is often very separate from the way people identify with you.'

National treasure Jenny Agutter has worked on cosy British films, Hollywood sci-fis and Marvel behemoths during her 50-year run. As she revisits her star-making role in The Railway Children Return, she tells Total Film how her career and her sex symbol status were never by design.

- By Jane Crowther

It's apt that Total Film should be sitting down with actor Jenny Agutter on the jubilee weekend celebrating the decades-long achievements of a woman who has remained in the public eye and hearts. Since bursting onto the scene as a 17-year-old firecracker in the whimsical 1970 adaptation of E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, she's been as regular a fixture in the British consciousness as Ma'am herself. Though possibly more instrumental in viewers' sexual awakening than Mrs. Queen, with provocative but empowered roles in Logan's Run, Equus, and An American Werewolf In London. She's worked with iconic directors, alongside legendary actors and parlayed a TV role into a national institution with her take on wimple-clad nun Sister Julienne in hugely popular BBC period drama Call The Midwife.

Now a bright-as-a-button 69-year-old, Agutter may have misplaced her glasses in her London home filled with artwork and light, but her vision of her own career is clear-eyed and pin-sharp. A child who dreamed of becoming a dancer but found herself triumphing at acting, the Somerset-born 16-year-old started her big-screen life with Nicolas Roeg's classic Walkabout, taking the location work in Australia and the deep subject matter in her stride. I'd travelled a lot - my father had been in the Army, and a part of my life was travelling with my brother and our family. So I was very open to different cultures and different things, she shrugs. The film that followed leap-frogged Walkabout's release date and made her an instant star. As Bobbie Waterbury, the plucky Edwardian girl who stops a train and averts disaster with her red bloomers in Lionel Jeffries' warm hug of a film, Agutter charmed audiences and opened up opportunities for the teen performer; leading to a stint of theatre and TV work before she made the jump to Hollywood.