Cranbrook student in The Diary of Anne Frank

A FORMER Cranbrook schoolgirl has been starring in the television drama The Diary of Anne Frank, showing on BBC 1 this week.

Ellie Kendrick, 18, has been playing the lead role of Anne in the drama which has been aired from 7 to 7.30pm every day on the corporation's flagship channel.

Miss Kendrick, who left Benenden School in Cranbrook last summer after seven years as a boarder, said: "Funnily enough, I had never read it before I got the part.

"I find that very odd because almost every teenage girl has done at least once.

"Perhaps that's one of the reasons why it worked for me.

"I was able to look at the diaries in a new way because they were fresh to me, as opposed to re-working something that I'd read a hundred times."

Maidstone-based Ellie, who is currently taking a gap-year and wants to go to university next year, had to combine filming the series with her school work.

But after gaining three A-Levels, her old headmistress Claire Oulton said she was "very proud" of her former pupil.

She told the Kent and Sussex Courier: "We have been treated to a number of superb performances at Benenden by Ellie over the past few years.

"We're delighted at her success and are very proud of her."

Although this is the first time Ellie has taken on the lead role in a high-profile production, she is no stranger to show-business.

As a member of the National Youth Theatre she trod the boards of several theatres and also appeared in other television dramas including Waking the Dead, Lewis and Prime Suspect.

She said playing Anne was "fascinating" and the scripts reflected a "real wit and verve".

She added: "There's a playfulness and vivacity to each episode in spite of that crushing sense of claustrophobia which must have been almost unendurable.

"Something that struck me was how little things have really changed since her lifetime.

"Us girls still have spats with our families, worry if they're pretty or not and become somewhat dangerously fixated upon boys."

Anne's diaries have been read by millions across the world. She started writing them, aged 13, in June 1942.

This was two weeks before her family was forced to go into hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland. After two years they were betrayed and transported to concentration camps.

Anne Frank died in March 1945 of hunger and typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.