Kate Ritchie recalls how she was forced to hide after a bully tipped a can of Coke over her head

She’s the Australian actress best known for playing Sally Fletcher on Channel Seven’s Home and Away for 20 years.

But despite Kate Ritchie’s successful TV career, the 42-year-old struggled to handle fame as a young girl and was bullied at high school.

On Tuesday’s episode of Anh’s Brush with Fame, Kate recalled how she was forced to hide in a phone box after a bully tipped a can of Coke over her head.

‘I used to get the train to and from school and I would often get groups of kids stand around me and give me a hard time,’ she said.

‘There was this one day I had this really bad feeling about this particular girl on the train so I got off at the station early and this girl got off at the same station.’

She continued: ‘So I just found the phone booth and I called my mum. And this girl just walked up behind me and proceeded to pour a can of Coke over me as I stood there in my school uniform.’

‘I still remember her laughing at me and I just felt so degraded and sad.’

Kate explained she didn’t understand ‘what I did to deserve it’ because she ‘always tried so hard to make other people feel better by not being proud or showing off.’

During the interview, Kate also admitted she felt ‘lost’ after making the decision to leave Home and Away in 2008.

‘It was just so frightening. What do I actually do when someone doesn’t hand me a schedule on a Friday afternoon and tell me where to be on a Monday?

‘And they were just the logistics that I knew I’d miss. I think it was the other stuff about missing the character and trying to figure out my identity without this other person, that was the stuff I hadn’t really considered too much and that hit me quite hard,’ she said.

As she struggled to hold back tears, Kate added that leaving her character behind was like losing her ‘best friend’.

‘She gave me purpose and a sense of achievement. I feel differently now, after loads of therapy. I thought the only thing I’d ever done of value in my life was when I was her,’ she said.

‘I was lost, and I wondered how I was going to survive without her. How were people going to react to me if I wasn’t Sally?’

She added: ‘Sally was a great person, a great friend and a great daughter. Did people only feel something for me because they liked her?’

Kate had spent two decades on Home and Away, and feared how she would cope without having a full-time job, but said quitting the soap ended up being the best decision she ever made.