Kitty Scherbatsky Paloma Baeza Kitty Scherbatsky is Dolly's sister, an 18-year-old debutante. Tolstoy based the character of Kitty on his own wife, Sonya. Levin's happily married domestic life with Kitty reflects Tolstoy's happy early years with Sonya. "Playing a Russian princess was wonderful," says Paloma Baeza. "It's like slipping into another magical world. But Kitty is more than a one-dimensional character. She starts out as the conventional well-brought-up girl playing the piano to catch her man, but the happy ending is quite different from the one she imagines. What I really like about her is that she has the ability to put social expectations aside and go with her feelings and her humanity. Before her wedding, her husband makes her read about all the other women he's ever slept with. It is almost as if he has an affair before they even begin their marriage. Another woman might not have gone through with the marriage, but Kitty is strong. She knows where she stands with her God and with her man." For Baeza, who starred in ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre's adaptations of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd and Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, swinging a bustle is second nature. In Kitty, she rose effortlessly to the challenge of ice skating in full 19th-century costume. "The frustrating thing was waiting for the ice to freeze in Poland. In the end, we had to go to Finland to find the right kind of ice."