The Bolter Frances Barber Fanny's mother pursues love and happiness the only way she knows how -- by bolting from one man to another. She leaves her daughter Fanny to be raised by her sister Emily and shows not a trace of guilt. One of the biggest challenges was perfecting the very specific aristocratic accent of the time, says actress Frances Barber. "Accents change, and the way they spoke then is not the way that the aristocracy speak now. Even the royal family don't speak that way anymore. But it was absolutely the right decision to use those accents, because it's so much of its time. "We listened to dozens of tapes of the Mitfords speaking to make sure that we got it right. But Celia Imrie... played a little joke on me. I arrived on set later than the rest of them.... So there I was in my first scene doing my accent, speaking in that very specific, posh way, and she suddenly leant over and whispered, 'You look a bit of a fool. None of us are doing that accent now.' Fortunately, she was pulling my leg." Barber is a well-known British actress who can be seen in BBC dramas such as Real Women, The Ice House, and Rhodes. She has also made countless guest appearances in popular dramas such as Mystery!'s Inspector Morse and Poirot. Her films include Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and Sammy And Rosie Get Laid. She has just finished filming Superstition, a thriller with Mark Strong and Charlotte Rampling. In Mitford's words: The Bolter She was curiously dated in her manner, and seemed still seemed to be living in the 1920s. It was as though, at the age of thirty-five, having refused to grow any older, she had pickled herself, both mentally and physically, ignoring the fact that the world was changing and that she was withering fast. She had a short canary-coloured shingle (windswept) and wore trousers with the air of one still flouting the conventions, ignorant that every suburban shopgirl was doing the same. Her conversation, her point of view, the very slang she used, all belonged to the late twenties, that period now deader than the dodo. She was intensely unpractical, foolish, and apparently fragile, and yet she must have been quite a tough little person really, to have walked over the Pyrenees, to have escaped from a Spanish camp, and to have arrived at Alconleigh looking as if she had stepped out of the chorus of No, No, Nanette. The Pursuit of Love, Chapter 20