For years Emily Atack was known for one part: Charlotte Hinchcliffe in The Inbetweeners. The Guardian described her spending years after it chasing the respect and the roles she felt she had earned. Playing Sarah Stratton in the TV version of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals changed that. She told the paper it was “the best job” of her life.
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The part that stuck
Atack was 17 when she won the role of Charlotte, the popular girl in the Channel 4 school comedy. She told BBC News that audiences link an actor with the characters they play, even a fictional one. She says some men began paying her unwanted attention from a very young age.
By 2023 she was receiving hundreds of explicit pictures and messages a day on social media. She made a BBC Two documentary about it, Emily Atack: Asking For It?. Research from 2020, which the BBC cited, found that 76% of girls aged 12 to 18 had been sent unsolicited nude images.
Why Sarah Stratton mattered
Stratton is a young woman in a hurry who draws a Conservative MP out of his marriage and then cheats on him. Atack argued that women like her have always been cast as villains. The Guardian’s interviewer noted that Cooper’s books neither mock nor condemn them.
She also said a story set in the 1980s had to be handled with care. She told the Guardian she would have turned the part down if she had doubted the show could portray those situations comfortably.
Where she came from
Atack grew up in Bedfordshire. Her mother is the singer and actor Kate Robbins, and her father, Keith Atack, sang with the 1970s band Child. When she was 16 her parents went through a bitter divorce. She left school and moved to a London flat with her sister, Martha.
In May 2026 she spoke on Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast about abuse she suffered as a child and as a teenager. She also told the podcast that sepsis kept her housebound for weeks after her son was born.
Family life now
Her son, Barney, was born in June 2024. His father is the scientist Dr Alistair Garner, whom Atack had known since childhood. The couple married at a church in the English countryside on 22 August 2026, with a second celebration in Spain planned for a few weeks later.
