EastEnders' Milly Zero dreamt she met Nasty Nick

Milly Zero had a dream she met her on-screen \'EastEnders\' father John Altman.

The 20-year-old star plays Dotty Cotton, the daughter of the late \'Nasty\' Nick Cotton - who John portrayed on the BBC One soap on and off from 1985 to 2015 - and in real life, the actress met the 68-year-old star and had a selfie with him in her dreams.

She said: "I had a dream where it was the actor John Altman, and we met in real life. We were in a crowd.

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"I got a picture with him, but the picture was really blurry, so I went back and said, \'Can we get another one? Because that one was rubbish!\'

"And I said, \'Hi, it\'s such an honour to play Dotty.\' "

Milly recalls watching \'EastEnders\' when John was strutting his stuff as bad boy Nick, and she looked back at some old footage of the villainous character - whose mother Dot Cotton (June Brown) left him to die of a heroin overdose in 2015 - when she landed the part of Dotty.

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She added to WhatsOnTV.co.uk: "I did used to watch him, but I was really young.

"When I joined \'EastEnders\', I watched some memories of him and some old archive clips, just to get a sense of him."

While Milly\'s late on-screen father will never return to Walford - apart from as a ghost - she would love to see the return of Dotty\'s estranged half-brother Charlie Cotton, who was played by Declan Bennett until 2017.

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She recently said: "That would be really interesting as Dotty is a bit of a lone wolf right now.

"Even though she lives with Sonia and Whitney, she isn\'t really related to them and they don\'t really have her back in the way that family does.

"I think having her family in the Square would be really interesting. I\'d be really keen to explore that."