Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh has revealed how she began to experience racism at an early age in primary school and was even subjected to physical racially-charged attacks. 

The TV actress, who plays Lady Danbury in the Netflix series, was born in Bristol to an English mother and a Ghanaian father.

The family moved around the UK due to Andoh’s parents’ work opportunities and was singled out as the only Black child at her primary school in the Cotswolds.

Andoh revealed how they were the only Black family within a 40-mile radius of the countryside and her friends would tell her to leave their house before their parents got home and saw they were hanging out together.

Recalling the shocking extent of the bullying, Andoh, 60, said of her earliest memory of pain in a new interview: ‘Having my head smashed against the wall in the infants, and it’s a traditional Cotswold stone county primary school, so Cotswold stone it’s bumpy.

‘You know like in the Beano you had “Gnnhhh!” – all those exclamations of pain. As my head would hit I would see stars, but I would also see the cartoon bubble of “Gnnhhh!”’

‘It stopped when I realised there was this thing I could do to make it stop,’ she added to Gyles Brandreth on his Rosebud podcast.

Andoh added how she was ‘walloped a lot’ and ‘beaten up’ in the infants and suffered a nervous breakdown by the time she got to sixth form. However, she fell in with the punk group at school and credits the movement with saving her life.

Even with all of the horrific abuse Adjoa had to endure, the Queen Charlotte actress can see the positives in how her ordeal shaped her future.

She said: ‘It’s given me an absolute everlasting love of nature, it taught me very early on to be self-conscious, that I had to make people like me, because they might not like me because of the look of me. And I think that’s a terrible burden for a child.

‘If I’d stayed in the Cotswolds, there’s a life I could have had that would have been working for Lloyds bank, getting married, settling down and just being there forever. That could have been a very nice life but I don’t think it’s a life I’m gifted for.’

Earlier this year, Andoh sparked over 8,000 Ofcom complaints when she referred to a ‘terribly white balcony’ at King Charles’ Coronation in May.

‘Looking at all those young people, there is a bit of me that has gone from the rich diversity of the Abbey to the terribly white balcony, I’m very struck by that,’ she said while commentating during ITV’s live coverage of the royal event.