Olivia’s tears for her great great great gran’s ordeal

we don’t know more about Harriot’s mummy, we don’t know her name. She gave up her daughter, hopefully for the best reasons, knowing she wouldn’t see her again.”

In the show, out on Monday, July 9, Olivia travels to India to find out more about Harriot. When told the child travelled to the UK unaccompanied, she says: “I hope someone took her under their wing. The thought of a tiny person alone for six months, it’s really sad.”

The star is thrilled to find Harriot returned to India as a young woman and settled there with her husband Charles, with whom she had four kids, before returning to England later in life.

Before starting her ancestral quest, Olivia – who will next play the Harriot & Charles Queen in Netflix hit The Crown – says her family all come from Norfolk and are “fairly boring”.

Later she says: “Before this I hadn’t a clue that India played any part in my family. I’m so much more interesting than I thought I was.” OLIVIA Colman weeps as she is told how her great-great-great-grandmother was sent across the world alone as a young child after her father died.

The Broadchurch actress, 44, hears how Harriot was just three or four when she was sent to England from her native India in 1810.

Her dad, Army captain William Slessor, had been employed by the East India company while her mum was a local woman from Kishanganj in Bihar state.

When William died in a shooting accident his mother sent for Harriot and paid for her passage to Britain.

Mum-of-three Olivia, whose youngest child is three in August, says on BBC1’S Who Do You Think You Are?: “She’s so little, not far off my youngest. Going to the other side of the world, wondering where daddy’s gone, and without mummy.”

She adds: “The thing I feel saddest about is