MEET THE OLD ELITE

Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) is clinging on to her aristocratic heritage and determined to keep newcomers out. She’s witty and snobbish but also has a kinder side. ‘She has a dry sense of humour and is appalled by the change in the city, a change she senses will not be for the better,’ says Christine.

Her sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon, right) never married and relies on Agnes’s charity. She’s a woman with a good sense of right and wrong. ‘I found the character delicious,’ says

Sex And The City star Cynthia. ‘She’s an enthusiastic, hearton-sleeve kind of person.’ Their niece Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) has been left penniless by her late father and is forced to appeal to her aunts for mercy.

Arriving in New York she becomes part of

their social circle – even if she doesn’t approve of the rules. ‘Marian knows her probable fate will be to marry as well as she can to survive, but she wants more than that,’ says Louisa, whose mother is Meryl Streep. ‘She’s curtailed by the rules of the time, but she wants to be fulfilled.’ Agnes’s son Oscar (Blake Ritson) is obsessed with money and one of the few who stands up to his mother.