Patricia Hodge

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:27

My Castaway this week is an actress. Her image of the cool, confident and intelligent woman belies the fact that her success has come comparatively late in life. She was born in Grimsby, where her parents ran a hotel. She eventually went to drama school, but acting did not bring her recognition until she was cast as the lawyer Philida Trant in Rumpole of the Bailey.

Presenter0:48

Since then her television roles as Diana Cooper in Edward and Mrs. Simpson, Jemima Shaw the Amateur Sleuth, and The Phamme Fatale in The Life and Loves of a She Devil have made her one of this country's most popular actresses. Late success has been accompanied by late motherhood. She had her first child when she was forty two, followed by another three years later. She is Patricia Hodge.

Presenter1:11

Tell me, Patricia, about this cool, slightly haughty image you have. How much is it you, and how much is it simply the the roles you're cast in?

Presenter1:19

Well, I hope it's the type of roles I'm cast in because I've never seen myself that way and it uh the more that I'm described as it, the more that it makes me laugh. So you're not like that, you're not cool. I think what I am is, along with most other people, absolutely terrified most of the time. And we all have different ways of of covering that up. And in my case, I suppose because everybody has their own sort of inner rhythm and um

Presenter1:43

Way of presenting themselves to the world. And I think that I go into a sort of glacial shell.

Presenter1:48

and apparently look as if I know what I'm doing when I don't at all. There's another theme, isn't there? You've played an awful lot of of of thirties women. You played in in the Mitford girls, you've played both um Nancy Mitford and and Move, you played Diana Cooper, as I said, and currently you're playing Miss Jean Brodie in the West End.

Presenter2:05

Now I wonder why that is. Is that again, it seems to be something more than you've just been typecast. You look right with the cool, crisp perm with the kloch hat, don't you? Well, that's a stylistic thing that uh goes back a long way, and I don't know why I have an affinity with that period, but it it goes back to my childhood, that my

Presenter2:25

Mother um was a a very good artist and at school she won an art prize, which was a needlework book.

Presenter2:32

And as she was at school in the early thirties, it was The Art of the Thirties, this Needlework Book. And of all the books we had at home, that was the one I turned to the most. I absolutely loved it. And I've always found that style an easy one to adopt and one that I admire very much in in all sorts of forms, in musical form, in artistic form, in dramatic form. But your husband doesn't like your hair in those thirties curls. Not at all. No, no. It th there's there's a pending divorce, but we're not talking about it.

Patricia Hodge2:56

But not at all.

Presenter3:01

Let's have record number one.

Presenter3:03

Well, taking up the premise of my attraction to the twenties and thirties, there is a great spectrum of music of this time that I love, not the least of which is Gershwin,

Presenter3:15

I think we reached um a peak in songwriting and uh musical style and wit that has to a certain extent gone.

Presenter3:24

One of the greatest embodiments of this to me is Gershwin's I Got Rhythm.

Presenter4:17

George Gershwin's I Got Rhythm, played by Joanna MacGregor. There was certainly a touch of old style grandeur to where you were brought up, Patricia Hodge, which was the Royal Hotel Grimsby. Can you describe it to me?

Presenter4:30

It's a vast red brick Victorian place. It was originally built as the Royal Dock Hotel. And it was right by the Grimsby Docks, which during the time I was living there were it was the biggest fishing port in the world. It was a major industry. And it's actually no joke that my sister and I were woken every morning with the dockers going to work in their clogs right outside our bedroom window.

Presenter4:53

So it didn't seem extraordinary to me, but looking back on it I think it's rather rather marvellous that I grew up with that. And was it very grand, the hotel? How many bedrooms did it have? Oh yes, it ultimate when we first moved into it it had only been open for a couple of years because it had been reclaimed during the war as a naval base.

Patricia Hodge5:01

Nope.

Presenter5:09

and opened by a local brewery company, Hewitt Brothers, as a hotel, but only part of it had been opened. And so we gradually saw the reopening of each floor during my time there. I think we ended up with about sixty or seventy bedrooms. And there was a ballroom, wasn't there? Well there were there were more than one actually but one major ballroom. It was the major three star hotel in the town. In those days three star was the best you got. And did you and your sister run riot around this place? Well we didn't run riot. I think we were jolly naughty sometimes but only out of um the the fact it was a a cornucopia of delight and adventure and particularly if we had friends with us who actually would get us up to more trouble than we would ourselves. Roller skating in the ballroom was um one of the major things and we would get all the banqueting chairs and make a kind of roller skating track.

Presenter5:56

That we would whiz round, and the housekeeper was none too pleased because it left scuff marks on the highly polished floor. But what about ordinary life? Where did you live? Did did you have your quarters? Yes, we we had um an apartment right at the top of the um building. And we were stuck away up there. And did you eat up there, or did you have the family table in the dining room? No, we we ate in the dining room nearly all the time. So a lot of rich food.

Patricia Hodge6:11

And did you eat?

Patricia Hodge6:17

Uh

Presenter6:19

Yes. I I as a child I knew what um Berfstroganoff was before I knew what Shepherd's Pie was, so I used to yearn to be ordinary and live in number two railway cuttings and for my mother to wear a headscarf and things like that.

Presenter6:32

And when I had a birthday I used to ask if we could have shepherd's pie, which to me was a a treat, and to the children coming to the party was a deep disappointment.

Presenter6:42

But a surreal existence then in a in a certain way. I mean odd, although perhaps if I mean you were a child you knew nothing else. No.

Patricia Hodge6:46

Oh.

Speaker 36:46

Yeah.

Presenter6:50

Absolutely. I think what it did do

Presenter6:53

was nurture my fantasies, uh, because I did spend quite a lot of time using my imagination.

Presenter7:00

My poor parents, who worked all the hours that God gives, did take a rest every afternoon, and and frequently I think when I got back from school and I would see that they were they were asleep.

Presenter7:10

I would go down to the ballroom and perhaps do a bit of piano practice. There was a grand piano, and I'd started playing the piano from the age of six. And then I would sort of get lost in this world that I I was on Sunday night at the London Palladium or something.

Presenter7:22

Record number two.

Presenter7:24

I have a long association with church music, which goes back to all my places of education, when I've sung in various choirs, but culminating when I was at drama school, the head of the music department was forming a church choir at his own local church, and asked some of us if we would make up the choir. And it's something I was glad to do, and have been very thankful for ever since, as it was such a marvellous training ground for all forms of choral singing. It was also while we were performing a particular concert in the church, as the church choir, that I met my husband. And so I would like to include, in this case, a piece of oratorio, Domine Deus Rex Celestis, from Vivaldi's Gloria, which is a marvellous intertwining of a soprano solo, in duet with an oboe, which is an instrument I'd love to have learned.

Speaker 38:24

In most generals.

Speaker 38:31

Yeah.

Speaker 38:32

He was far from the

Speaker 38:59

Father in Hales that challenges Hill's father's

Presenter9:22

Nancy Argenta singing Domine Deus Rex Chelistis from Vivaldi's Gloria, with the English concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock. So you had piano lessons aged six, elocution lessons aged eight. Now, why were those considered necessary?

Patricia Hodge9:31

Hmm.

Presenter9:37

I don't know. I think my family believed and it went back.

Presenter9:41

one or two generations at least, that um an education if you had no money for anything else in the world, you spent it on education because it was something you could never take away. So they lived probably in in fairly modest surroundings, but they made sure uh my m certainly my mother's family made sure they could sing and dance and speak and play an instrument, all those things. And so it was natural that my mother would get my sister and I to do the same thing.

Patricia Hodge10:02

Okay.

Presenter10:06

But it wasn't that you had a heavy accent? No, I didn't at that point. I only really m got into um that when I uh went to the grammar school and where I had to then meld in with everyone else. This was Grimsby Grammar? It was the Grimsby-Wintringham Girls' Grammar School. And the girls took the Mickey out of you. They did. Well, I think they thought that living in a hotel was like living in Buckingham Palace and that I had set myself there and that I m thought I was something extraordinary for living there, which of course I wasn't. I mean this is why I wanted to disappear behind two railway cuttings.

Patricia Hodge10:23

For which is why I

Presenter10:37

But, listen, anything's a good training for life, you know, it made me stand up for myself. You were bullied.

Presenter10:42

Yes, i in in as much as girls

Presenter10:46

Can do to each other verbally, not physically. Psychological bullying. You were apparently by your own admission.

Speaker 310:49

Hmm.

Patricia Hodge10:49

Top.

Patricia Hodge10:51

Well

Presenter10:53

Um permanently anemic, wet and weedy.

Presenter10:57

Well, my sister always said she thought I was going to break in two. I think I I did look uh fairly f fragile at that point. But has it left a lasting impression on you, this?

Presenter11:07

Brain

Speaker 311:07

Brain

Presenter11:08

I think I've grown up with a feeling that it's not too good to be too successful as a child, because it it then makes you

Presenter11:16

These things are character building, and it makes you try all the more when you grow up. So it it's perhaps not uh unusual from what you say that you should have decided, although you were obviously quite shy and a bit got at, that you wanted to go on the stage. Was there a moment when you actually thought, That is what I want to do?

Speaker 311:21

See?

Patricia Hodge11:21

Uh

Presenter11:34

Yes. The first time I saw professional theatre was when I was ten and my mother brought me, with another child and a friend of hers, to see Where the Rainbow Ends at the Victoria Palace. In London. In London. And until then my outlet for anything theatrical was through ballet and dancing, which I went to.

Patricia Hodge11:47

Yeah.

Presenter11:55

and through seeing um the East Coast Dance Festival on the Pier in Cleethorpes, which we had every year and so on. And to suddenly see a complete stage show like that, I I thought I had landed on another planet, and I just looked and thought that's the only place I want to be.

Presenter12:11

But it wasn't. Certainly not. No. I I looked in the programme and I saw it said um children from the Italia Conti Stage School in London. So I then went on a two year pilgrimage to beg my parents to

Patricia Hodge12:11

Are you paid?

Patricia Hodge12:13

S

Presenter12:23

to send me there and they wouldn't.

Presenter12:25

And uh

Presenter12:27

All that did happen was that eventually, out of sheer frustration, um two or three of us at school got together and wrote a review. And we we did presented this review, which it was in the very early days of commercial advertising on television and uh we put we put adverts in and everything. We thought we were being very clever. And as a result of that, obviously somebody in the staff room got talking and our names were put on a blackboard and asked to audition for the next school play.

Presenter12:54

And um and I got in and that was the beginning of that was the beginning of it all. However, you had to train as a teacher and and become an infant school mistress before all of that.

Presenter13:03

I went to teachers' training college and I learned to teach small children and um I did drama as a main subject, but uh really with small children one teaches them everything is general teaching. But towards the end of that time I was then bold enough to apply for drama school, and I did and got in.

Presenter13:22

Record number three.

Presenter13:24

On this desert island I think I would be

Presenter13:29

Terribly bereft without a cinema screen.

Presenter13:32

One piece of music which would give me first of all, it's a piece of music I love secondly, it would give me total recall of one of the great moments to me in film history, at the film Brief Encounter, and that is um the accompaniment which was used for the film Rechmaninoff's Piano Concerto, No. Two.

Presenter14:44

Part of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number Two, played by Vladimir Ashkenazi with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrei Previn. You finally got into drama school, aged twenty two. Were you any good when you got there?

Presenter14:57

Well, I think what they thought I was was technically uh adroit, but not giving enough in the um emotion department.

Presenter15:06

which does take quite a while to release in everyone, but in my case, because I'd already started a career, there were two or three of us that were that much older, and they were I was at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and uh the downfall of this was that you do I mean, everything every profession in life one does adopt a persona for.

Presenter15:24

And if that persona has started to form, you've got to break it down. As an actor, you know, one's own instrument. And you've got to understand and know what makes that function in order to be someone else. So it just took me a little longer to break it down than some of the others. So there were a few sort of sharp words of warning at the end of the first year when I was absolutely convinced I was going to be thrown out on my ear, but thankfully I wasn't. But they wanted you to give more. They wanted you to be more passionate, did they? Yes, and just open myself up. And it was, you know, all part of this I suppose it it comes back to what people perceive as coolness, that it looks as if I suppose that I don't care when I do. I just can't necessarily show it. But I've seen it said that by someone that in fact you never quite achieved that until you had children in the last few years, that now you're capable of being much more publicly passionate than ever you were. Well I think having children has to be one of the the biggest changes one can make in one's life and maybe that's it was that realisation of

Presenter16:23

knowing there was uh a part of me that hadn't been realized that was uh fundamental in my need to have children.

Presenter16:31

More music.

Presenter16:33

I've been a long time admirer of Julie Andrews, and

Presenter16:38

An equally longtime admirer of Stephen Sondheim.

Presenter16:42

Because of my passion for musical theatre, and I think he's one of the greatest exponents.

Presenter16:47

Quite early on in my time at Landra I'd been given I was a very poor student and I'd been given um some theatre vouchers as a present.

Presenter16:54

by my cousin and uh we went to see the show Company, which was on at Her Majesty's and the number Being Alive in it is one of my all-time favourites of Sondheim's. Julie Andrews some years ago was doing a a solo concert which she brought to the palladium and then she took on a world tour and her version of it is surprisingly because it was written for a man to sing but her version is to me the greatest.

Speaker 317:22

Make me alive Make me confused

Speaker 217:22

Me alive.

Presenter17:23

I

Speaker 317:29

Mock me with praise Let me be you

Speaker 317:36

Mary my days, for alone is alone.

Presenter17:44

Go

Speaker 317:46

Not alone.

Presenter17:52

Julie Andrews singing Being Alive from Stephen Sondheim's Company. Is that how you saw yourself at the time? Or perhaps you see yourself now as, you know, the belting out the big number in the stage musical?

Presenter18:03

I'd like to be able to sing like like Julie or like Julia Mackenzie and have a really major voice. I don't have that. I have a voice that can put

Patricia Hodge18:10

Have that.

Presenter18:12

numbers over to a certain extent. But I have to be selected.'Cause you had your chances, didn't you, when you were young? You were in some musicals at the beginning of your career. Yes, and have been, I mean, all the way through really from time to time. It's just a question of, um There are certain things I can do and certain things I I wouldn't even attempt to do. But your first big break was in television, really, wasn't it? It was when it was John Mortimer himself who saw you, was it, and decided that you should be in Rumpole of the Bailey?

Presenter18:36

I'd done some television before that, but then I was going through a period of doing theatre, and I was doing a play at the Bush theatre written by

Presenter18:47

Tina Brown, and this play was called Happy Yellow. It was a very good play. It got a lot of attention. And sitting in the audience, among others, was John Mortimer, who was looking for a young barrister to play in his new series of Rumpole of the Bailey. So he asked that I should be seen for it, and it went on from there. And that was 1978, and there were then seven series of that lasting over the next decade or more. And the rest is history. And apart from the parts we've mentioned, there's been, of course, the cloning of Joanna May on the television, many other parts. And currently, it's Miss Jean Brodie in her prime in the West End.

Presenter19:23

Uh the problem with Miss Jean Brodie is of course that everybody knows your words.

Presenter19:28

Some of the famous epigrammes are in the first uh scene, and once one's got through that, there's an awful lot that surprises everyone and opens one's mind, and you think, Of course I mean, we one tends to think of the creme de la grème, but there is an awful lot more of Muriel Spark's glorious writing than that. And the accent obviously isn't a problem.

Presenter19:45

I've heard you, I know you.

Presenter19:48

Well, I have done accents uh during the course of my career. Not very often, because people tend to sort of want me for what I I do in real life, but I always find it a great release, rather like putting on a mask. You know, you really do become someone else when you adopt another accent. And I'm surrounded by a Scottish caste, and I would just go up to them and say, Say Mary to me.

Presenter20:08

And they would say it because it's I tend was tending to say Mary, and it's Mary.

Presenter20:13

You you have to do the crème de la creme formula. Little girls.

Patricia Hodge20:15

Kind of like a

Presenter20:17

I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the creme de la creme. The only other problem, I suppose, with doing Jean Brodie is that Maggie Smith won an Oscar for her in the film, and again people attribute that quote and that accent to her. Was that a problem for you?

Presenter20:36

I think more in other people's minds than in my own, in that it was a wonderful performance she gave, but what we are doing is the play, and

Presenter20:44

I think people are absolutely astonished that they think they know it, and they actually don't. What one remembers about it is not really the main drift of what Muriel Spark wrote, which is a an extraordinary, very serious, but at the same time very funny.

Presenter21:00

Play and story.

Presenter21:04

I love it. Yes, I do. Record number five.

Presenter21:09

This brings us back to the music of the twenties and thirties. I have a great passion for the great lyric writers. This one I think embodies everything that I love. It's a beautiful lyric. Um it's a Dietz and Schwartz number called By Myself.

Presenter21:24

It's sung in this particular instance by Fred Astaire. It was originally recorded by Jack Buchanan, and my dear friend Steve Ross sang this recently when we were doing cabaret together at Impizra on the Park. I think the lyric is very opposite for someone struggling on their own on a desert island.

Patricia Hodge21:43

I go my way by myself.

Patricia Hodge21:48

Like a bird on the wing.

Patricia Hodge21:53

I'll face the unknown.

Patricia Hodge21:59

I'll build a world of my own.

Patricia Hodge22:04

No one knows better than I myself.

Patricia Hodge22:09

I'm by myself.

Presenter22:11

Fred Astaire, singing BY MY SELF. You were married Patricia Hodge when you were twenty nine. Um the success we've described happened when you were knocking on through your thirties, as it were years when you might have become pregnant, but you didn't. How much did you mind about that?

Presenter22:29

Oh.

Presenter22:30

Quite desperately really, but I think the crisis point was inevitably towards the the late thirties when I realized it probably wasn't going to happen. You'd been through all the gynecological tests and everything.

Presenter22:43

everything really that it was possible to go through, you know. And uh

Presenter22:48

It was

Presenter22:49

One of those things they call unexplained infertility.

Presenter22:53

I mean the f the early part of my thirties, um

Presenter22:56

I

Presenter22:57

Just thought, oh, well, it'll happen when it's ready. I had a very relaxed attitude to it. By the time I got to middle thirties, I thought, well, maybe I better do something about this. But I remember saying,

Presenter23:06

To the person I saw, I want you to know I'm not in a state about this. I probably was, but I wasn't admitting to

Presenter23:13

The word

Presenter23:14

Quite a few years of

Presenter23:16

intense heartache which I didn't

Presenter23:18

really share with people for a long time.

Presenter23:21

How close did you come to break down over it?

Presenter23:27

Very close, really. I did in the end seek um professional help, uh, because it's not something you can very easily share with your friends, most of whom have children of their own anyway, and what they're going to

Presenter23:42

feel is guilt because of their children and I wouldn't wish them to feel that for anything. I I was given enormous help professionally.

Presenter23:50

And then after what, nearly fourteen barren years, one day, aged forty one, they were pregnant now.

Patricia Hodge23:55

Page forty

Patricia Hodge23:57

Lunch

Presenter23:58

Ha have you any explanation for that other than than the obvious? I mean, uh some people say when they stop having treatment or they adopt a child that suddenly they find themselves pregnant. Was there any

Presenter24:09

feature of that kind in your life.

Presenter24:11

There were a number of things that happened. I suppose I'd reached I hadn't reached a stage where I'd given up, but I'd reached a a kind of frozen state. That's the only way I can describe it. I couldn't.

Presenter24:22

any longer project towards the future, I was living on a day to day basis.

Presenter24:26

And um one of the things that happened, I think, was my father got very ill. Um he he became terminally ill, and so my attention was taken by his illness. And um it r this pregnancy really happened in the wake of that. So ironically as his life was ebbing away my son's life was on its way, and he did at least know it the nearest he he got was um putting his hand on my stomach and he felt the baby kick, but he died three months before.

Presenter24:58

Alexander was born.

Presenter24:59

And Alexandra is now five, nearly six, and A couple of years later miraculously miracle is the word that has cropped up time and again when you've told this story you were pregnant again, and you produced your second son, Edward, who's now three.

Presenter25:15

Miracle, as I say, is the word. It must have felt something like that.

Presenter25:19

Yes, it's something that I I still haven't got over. I don't think there's a there's a night when I go and look at them in bed when I still can't really believe they're there.

Presenter25:29

I have to say, how however,

Presenter25:32

much of a shock it was to have Alexander and the delight of that. It never really occurred to me that it would happen again.

Presenter25:40

I did have a miscarriage in between, and then I thought, well, that's absolutely it.

Presenter25:45

And then suddenly Edward was on his way, and really from day one it was almost like he it was meant to be.

Presenter25:52

Let's have some more music.

Presenter25:54

I'm in danger of revealing too much of my love of musical theatre. But from another

Presenter26:01

corner of it, if you like, comes Leonard Bernstein, who I admire greatly, and his work Candide is one of my favorite. And this last track, which is called Make Our Garden Grow, is

Presenter26:15

full of hope and would give me enormous encouragement on my desert island to get on and look after myself and make life worth while.

Presenter26:56

The New York City opera singing Make Our Garden Grow from Condide, music by Leonard Bernstein.

Presenter27:03

Most women, Patricia, who'd waited so long for their children as long as you did, wouldn't go back to work at all unless they absolutely had to. Wh why have you?

Presenter27:14

I did decide that I would want to be for my children the person I'd always been. I think it's very important that truth exists as much as possible in the upbringing of children, and that you're always true to them. And part of that is being truthful to oneself.

Presenter27:30

I think

Presenter27:31

having done the sort of work I do and having had a particular existence for so long, it would be different, I think, if I had been twenty seven when I had these children.

Presenter27:42

that to give it all up and find oneself um doing tumble tots and mini gym and and that sort of thing every day of the week, much as I love to do it from time to time, but doing it as uh uh as one's complete life was not really going to nourish my soul, as they say. I weigh everything up as it comes in, and first of all it's got to be something that I really want to do.

Presenter28:05

Therefore, that it's worth walking out of the front door to do. The second thing is: can this fit in with my life? And amazingly, it does. So being in the West End obviously does, because you can be with them all day and then go to the theatre in the evening. That's right. It's me that's burning the candle at both ends, but it doesn't, it affects them very, very little. But there is one great problem, isn't there, in being a mother of these young things when you're age 48. It's all very well being an icon of late motherhood, but it must be absolutely exhausting. Uh, yes.

Patricia Hodge28:13

So being in

Presenter28:33

I think I've got more and more and more used to it. I it's rather like running a a marathon race. You you know, you you become uh an athlete that's that's trimmed your muscles ready for the task, and that's really what it feels like. But you see, on the plus side, they give me so much reason to live and and to do what I do, and I do it for them now. I mean, I do it to achieve things on all different levels for them. How else has it changed you, I wonder, having these children? Has it changed your attitude to life, to yourself, to the way in which you look after yourself, or?

Presenter29:05

Worry about your age or

Presenter29:07

First of all, I take much more care of myself for their sake. I mean, I intend to be around for a long time, because you do realize, you know, having a small baby at forty two is one thing, having an adolescent at the age of sixty is quite another, and those are the sort of things I have to face and that are, you know, yet to come.

Presenter29:25

In terms of how it's changed me as a as a person, it puts one in touch with all the far corners of oneself, that's what I would say.

Presenter29:32

Record number seven.

Presenter29:35

As you probably witness, pop music doesn't ride very high on this list. I'm not a lover of pop music per se, but there are certain exceptions. Um I feel the lyrics of pop music are generally so banal.

Presenter29:49

that the least that it can do is make you want to get up and dance. One of my favorite tracks that certainly makes me want to get up and dance is Barbara Streisand singing Stony End.

Speaker 330:02

Born from love and my poor mother were combined.

Speaker 330:08

I was raised on the good work of Jesus Till I read between the lines Now I don't believe I wanna see

Speaker 330:29

Uh

Presenter30:32

Barbara Streisand singing Stony End. Have you got any reason at all to look forward to life on this island, Patricia?

Presenter30:39

Well, I think the most attractive proposition from where I am in my life now would be the peace.

Presenter30:47

to actually have

Presenter30:49

Space and time to think is a rarity for me now, but the desert island would would give me that. What about makeup? Can I ask you about that? The face. I mean, you're very skilful at applying it. It's been mentioned many times when people have written about you that you can metamorphose yourself. I mean, do you enjoy doing that? Would you need it on the island, or would you love doing without it? I'd love to do without it, really. It's born of necessity. I tell you, I would love to be Mia Pharaoh and wake up and just put a little soap and water on my face and face the world as I am. I just have this very pale colouring. I've had to just put some character into my face, but it would be heaven not to have to do it. I find it a chore.

Presenter31:30

And it's not a mask that you hide behind or any of the masks. I think it's a major mask I hide behind, but uh

Patricia Hodge31:32

Oh sure it is.

Presenter31:36

It's helped me along life's stony path.

Presenter31:40

And the important desert island question, of course, is uh for you, are are you still wet and weedy underneath? Or are you has success turned you into a coper? Would it be all right? Well, I think maybe.

Speaker 331:48

Yeah.

Presenter31:51

I never was that wet and weedy.

Presenter31:53

The interesting thing about one's development i in life is learning to trust your instincts and um

Presenter32:00

that somewhere along the line those instincts must have been all right, and that gradually, albeit late in the day, in my case, I have been brave enough to follow what I thought was the right path for me. That isn't to say.

Presenter32:14

that the more responsibility you get, the more frightening it is. And I think I was happiest of all years ago jumping around in a chorus of two gentlemen of Verona when I had no responsibilities. Now, playing something like Gene Brodie, I thought I was literally going to die on the opening night, but that that doesn't change in any of us.

Presenter32:32

Last record.

Presenter32:34

This is something which being miles away from home and in a totally different climate and different

Presenter32:41

Culture, or should I say lack of culture on the island, would remind me more than anything of my country of origin.

Presenter32:47

I have always loved English traditional music.

Presenter32:52

My

Presenter32:53

Top exponent.

Presenter32:55

of this is Percy Granger. His treatment of English folk music is really wonderfully witty and clever. And I would go straight down the line, though there there'd be a lot of more obscure choices I could make, but I would go straight down the line and choose the orchestral version of Country Gardens, because it would also remind me of the ballet, which um I suppose until I fell in love with acting, I dreamed about being a major ballet dancer.

Presenter34:00

Percy Granger's Country Gardens played by the Bournemouth Sinfonetta conducted by Kenneth Montgomery. So if you could only take one of those eight records.

Presenter34:08

Out of an impossible choice I would probably take

Presenter34:11

The Bernstein Make Our Garden Grow. And what about your book?

Presenter34:16

I found it impossible to alight on any one novel. So I thought what I would like to take and this is a bit of a cheat, because I I don't know if I'm going to be allowed it. Um I know that this exists in four volumes, not in one, but I would like a compendium of the plays of Harold Pinter, and if possible the screenplays as well.

Presenter34:37

And I thought I would like to sort of go through each play and reassess it and play all the parts myself.

Presenter34:45

Well, you haven't told me they come in four volumes. I think I'm sure they come in one. Fine. What about your luxury?

Patricia Hodge34:48

I think I'm sure.

Presenter34:52

I would like to take

Presenter34:55

A supply of embroidery. Anything to do with my hands is the one antidote that I find uh the most soothing in life. It's the hobby that I don't have time for at the moment, but I will. And um it means I could make something that would have a beautiful end result and I could hang up in my little abode. Your cave. My cave or my hut or whatever else.

Presenter35:17

Patricia Hodge, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 235:29

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.