Actor  Rufus Sewell’s new role in the BBC’s new version of Arabian Nights brought back childhood memories of reading by firelight in his family’s Welsh cottage.

Sewell, 33, who was brought up in Twickenham but spent much of his childhood in Wales, stars alongside Alan Bates, Jane Lapotaire, Vanessa Mae, Dougray Scott and Alexei Sayle in the BBC’s May Bank Holiday mini-series.

He still has strong links with Wales, as his mother Jo moved to Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, 17 years ago when she married lorry driver Peter Davies, and now lives opposite Brown’s Hotel, the pub made famous by Dylan and Caitlin Thomas.

And he has revealed that when he landed the part of Ali Baba in the BBC mini-series he was reminded of the time he used to spend as a child in Wales.

“We used to spend about half our time in this cottage,” he said. “There was no electricity, the toilet was at the end of the garden and we had no running water.

“I remember that, by firelight, every night, we’d read and it was stories like One Thousand And One Nights and works by Edgar Allan Poe and H G Wells.”

Arabian Nights, which will be shown on BBC1 between Sunday, April 31 and Monday, May 1, was filmed in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, 400 miles south of Istanbul. The area also provided the location for George Lucas’s sci-fi blockbuster, Star Wars.

Sewell plays bumbling thief Ali Baba who discovers a hidden cave filled with treasure and outwits a murderous gang of 40 thieves.

“It was fantastic fun,” he says. “It was a bit like doing panto because we were all allowed to dress up and wear silly beards.”

Sewell studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama where his talent was recognised by Dame Judi Dench.

And he is best known for roles in the BBC’s adaptation of Middle-march; in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and in the film, Carrington.

On the big screen he has starred alongside Kiefer Sutherland and William Hurt in the sci-fi thriller, Dark City, and with Shakespeare in Love star Joseph Fiennes in Martha - Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence.

Sewell, who is not keen on the sex symbol image thrust upon him, said that the role of Ali Baba was a welcome change from the complicated and often romantic roles he has played so far in his career.

In the past he has been romantically linked with Madonna and Kate Winslet, but last year he married Australian fashion-buyer Yasmin Abdallah who he met while filming Dark City Down Under.

He has just returned from America where, in contrast to the role of Ali Baba, he played a satanic cult leader in Bless The Child, a movie starring Kim Basinger and Christina Ricci, which is due for release in the States in the early summer.

He is also just about to jet off to Prague on a four-month shoot for another big American movie, A Knight’s Tale.

“I leap back and forth between Hollywood movies and the London stage,” he explains.