John Laurie

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:32

This week, our castaway is the Scottish actor John Laurrie. John, could you endure loneliness for an extended period?

John Laurie0:39

Yes, I'm very good at being lonely. I like being alone.

John Laurie0:42

I have a vivid imagination. I like reading.

John Laurie0:46

I like listening to music.

Presenter0:47

Can you think of any one particular thing you'd be very happy to have got away from in civilization?

John Laurie0:54

No, not really.

John Laurie0:56

Except something you can't do anything about, or rage. Did you have any plan in choosing your eight records? How did you set about it?

John Laurie1:04

I just began to think of the tunes that had haunted me.

John Laurie1:08

The themes

John Laurie1:10

The th the ones I like best. I'm not a great uh listener to gramophone music.

Presenter1:15

What's the first one you've got on that little pile there?

John Laurie1:17

Rightly it is an overture, and rightly it's one of the great overtures.

John Laurie1:21

Beethoven's Leonora number three and uh I I'm playing this just to get me going as it were on some of the greatest music ever written.

Presenter2:25

The Beethoven Leonora No. 3 Overture. Sir George Shelte conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Let's go straight into your second record. What's that?

John Laurie2:33

Ah, this is a tune that's haunted me, I think, all my life.

John Laurie2:37

And sometimes I I I I've got to

John Laurie2:40

You hum it over to someone to say, Who wrote that? What is that?

John Laurie2:44

And of course I always discover that it's the Bussies, G minor.

John Laurie2:48

uh quartet, the slow movement.

Presenter3:53

The beginning of the third movement of Debussy's string quartet in G minor, played by the Guaneri Quartet. John, what part of Scotland are you from?

John Laurie4:01

Dumfrey's just over the border, thirty miles north of Carlisle.

John Laurie4:05

And so I am really almost falling into England. But we are very, very Scottish just over the border, I think possibly more so than they are sometimes in the Highlands. We are aggressively Scottish. Our accent is strongest, I think, in all Scotland.

John Laurie4:20

I had to come south and learn how to speak English when I decided to come an actor. Did you see much theatre as a child in Dumfries? No, very, very, very little indeed.

Speaker 24:26

Yeah.

John Laurie4:29

This is one of the mysteries, you see, because I had a father who was an elder of the kirk, and a very strict elder of the kirk at that and if he had lived I'd never, never have got on the stage, that is quite certain.

Presenter4:38

As a boy, what had you made up your mind you were going to be?

John Laurie4:41

I I very much wanted to be an architect. In fact, I started training as an architect.

Presenter4:46

Yes.

John Laurie4:46

Did two years before I went into the war.

Presenter4:49

Yes, you were still in your teens, of course, when you were were swept up in the First World War. You went through some of the worst of it, the Somme and Passchendaele.

John Laurie4:56

That's right. I got as far as Passchendale, and then something decided for me inside that it was enough, and I found myself in a stretcher. I wasn't h wounded in any way, no bloodshed whatsoever.

John Laurie5:06

But I was quite worn out.

Presenter5:09

But

John Laurie5:10

I do

Presenter5:10

He would have mobilized.

John Laurie5:10

Yeah.

John Laurie5:11

Then I went back to Dumfries to pick up again with my architecture, but it was my third year and I felt that I'd cost mother plenty.

John Laurie5:19

And that I it was time I actually made my living. The only thing I could make my living at was as an actor. Where did you study? At Miss Fogarty's School, which was the Central School of Speech Training in the Albert Hall. Very grand. And I I had a very good training and I did speak very good English.

Presenter5:31

Very grand.

John Laurie5:35

So that within five years I was playing Hamlet at Stratford.

Presenter5:38

What was your first professional engagement?

John Laurie5:40

At the Vicar.

John Laurie5:41

The old Vic in in dear old Lillian's days with Robert Atkins. A marvellous training. Robert was a very difficult man, very angry man. He had perpetual earache.

John Laurie5:52

and uh w was savage to uh us youngsters. But he was a kind of true Elizabethan.

John Laurie6:00

He did the Shakespeare very much.

John Laurie6:03

as a Shakespeare must have seen it.

Presenter6:05

You went to Stratford almost immediately after the old

John Laurie6:07

I combined the Vic with Stratford, which is something which nobody else had ever been allowed to do, which shows that uh l she did like me, the old lady, or she wouldn't have let me do it. I mean, I went on from the end of a Vic season into a Stratford season.

Presenter6:21

And it was at Stratford that you played Hamlet for the first time.

John Laurie6:23

In my second season at Stratford, I played Hamlet. This was uh an extraordinary chance because I had only been five years on the stage and uh w such a thing was quite unheard of. But the strange thing is, looking back on it, that was my definitive Hamlet. That's the way to play Hamlet. Don't wait too long.

John Laurie6:42

like some of the boys are doing today.

Presenter6:44

At that peak in your career, John, let's break for your third record. What's that to be?

John Laurie6:48

My third record.

John Laurie6:51

is a setting of a very fine

John Laurie6:54

Late Victorian poem, The Music Makers, O'Shaughnessy is the poet.

John Laurie7:00

and the musician

John Laurie7:03

Is it our

John Laurie7:04

Elgar

Presenter8:07

Elgar's The Music Makers, Janet Baker with the London Philharmonic Choir and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Belt.

Presenter8:15

Now you played Hamlet in London as well as its chapter, didn't you?

John Laurie8:18

Uh At the figure.

John Laurie8:19

I'd never played it outside the vicar. No, I didn't. I played the king in Hamlet uh uh uh in London, but not Hamlet himself. Didn't you play it at the court?

John Laurie8:28

No, I played the king at the court, didn't I? I think so. Esme Percy, oddly enough, nearly old enough to be my father. He played Hamlet. It was rather strange. I I played a a very sprightly Claudius.

Presenter8:41

Well, after those years of of Shakespeare in in the early thirties, you had a spell of light comedy.

John Laurie8:47

That's true.

John Laurie8:48

I'm about to forget that. I like playing comedy very much. At the Vic I started a comic. I stayed a comic for years. And that's why when I originally suggested to the the manager at Stratford that I play Hamlet, he thought it was a very funny idea. And indeed I can still remember my notices. Comedian plays Hamlet. So I started as a comic but

John Laurie9:09

Never played very much since then.

Presenter9:11

No, you are in the improper duchess. Ah ah

John Laurie9:13

Ah ah I'd forgotten that too. Yes, I loved the proper duchess because th th the dear old French lady, what was her name Yves oh, one of the loveliest women ever She really was a darling.

Presenter9:21

We've got on the

John Laurie9:25

And I can remember that was the only time I was ever drunk on the stage.

John Laurie9:29

I'd been to

John Laurie9:30

extraordinary to races. It's not a thing I do much. But I I I went haywire and got tight on the way back.

John Laurie9:37

And and really that performance was a travesty. But she was so kind and nursed me along, and they all thought it was so funny, but it wasn't like John Lawrie to be drunk. But I I I still remember that with horror and shame.

Presenter9:51

Uh

John Laurie9:51

You've done a Great deal of theatre work above

Presenter9:53

Bro

John Laurie9:53

Yeah.

Presenter9:53

Uh

John Laurie9:54

Yes, I've had been lucky in my travels, both uh filmatically and in theatre. Wonderful long tour of uh India. I I was really wasn't too happy there, because India is so enormous, and so the contrast between riches and poverty are so extreme that no man of sensitivity could judge enjoy it.

Presenter10:17

And you played in sorry?

John Laurie10:18

South Africa?

John Laurie10:19

Yes, so I did. I played leads on on three plays, none of which I was very good in.

Presenter10:24

And there was a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Lear that went pretty well everywhere.

John Laurie10:28

That was the greatest.

John Laurie10:29

That was wonderful, with Schofield and Peter Brooke directing. Peter Brooke and I didn't get on very well.

John Laurie10:36

We're both strong-natured people.

John Laurie10:38

with ideas of our own.

John Laurie10:40

But still I fought my way through, and by the time the six months' run had finished,

John Laurie10:45

Starting, as you know, behind the curtain and going across to the States, he thought I was quite all right.

Presenter10:52

Let's have another record. We've got a number four. What's that going to be?

John Laurie10:55

Ah, this is has got a weird story about it, because sometimes and you haven't asked it, but I'll ask it for you. Tell me, John, is there any part you haven't played that you'd like to play? Yes, I'd like to have played Don Quixote. That's a part which I think I understand terribly well. I'm tremendously fond of the book, and there's a great deal of the old boy that I have in me, apart altogether that I'm a Scotch peasant and he was a Don.

John Laurie11:21

But I understand the man very well. But it has been a secret thing of mine that I'd love to have played Don Quixote. That is, until I watched Paul Tortellia playing it on television, and I thought he was such a wonderful Quicksart. Played the suffering, the exaltation. This is the best performance of Don Quixote that's ever been given, is this man brooding over his cello.

Presenter12:50

An excerpt from Richard Strauss's Don Quixote with Paul Totellier as cellist.

John Laurie12:57

How many films?

Presenter12:57

Yeah.

John Laurie12:57

Landau.

John Laurie12:59

I once counted them, and that was a long time ago, and it came to a hundred. This is very surprising, because very, very few of them would ever be shown again, even very late at night, on American television.

Presenter13:12

There must be some that you like to remember.

John Laurie13:15

Yes, there are a few. Th one of the early ones, the Hitchcock one, I liked very much.

John Laurie13:21

thirty nine steps. I only had a little bit, but I had enormous pleasure of hitting dear Peggy Ashcroft in the face. Very angry because she was getting off.

Presenter13:29

Triangle

John Laurie13:31

with Robert when I'd put him up for the night very unwillingly.

Presenter13:33

Rob a donut

John Laurie13:37

I've got Vivejellus.

John Laurie13:39

And I decided that they were having an affair and

John Laurie13:44

It was a savage scene. I can still remember it, and how Hitchcock

John Laurie13:47

Eh he was quite pleased with me about it. We were rehearsing that scene.

John Laurie13:53

And Peggy and Robert were chatting away about uh what who they'd met and what they'd been doing and everything else for about an hour while the lights were set.

John Laurie14:02

And then he suddenly said, Right, let's have it.

John Laurie14:05

And Robert and Peggy, with one voice, said, Oh, what's the scene?

John Laurie14:09

And Hitchcock was very, very angry.

John Laurie14:12

He walked right round that huge studio at Shepherd's Bush in silence with everybody watching, terrified. He went up to one of the biggest lamps at 2000, unscrewed it, threw it on the floor, made a great bang, and then he said, now let's rehearse. Terrifying, terrifying moment. This was Hitchcock.

Presenter14:33

But he made a great film.

John Laurie14:34

It wasn't

Presenter14:34

Great film. It was a great film.

John Laurie14:36

Uh

Presenter14:36

And you've done a great amount of radio and television, of course, especially recently. Now, John, how do you feel after fifty five years in the profession doing the most distinguished work in the classical theatre? You'll find you achieved your greatest popular recognition by doing perhaps the the least demanding role you've ever played, Private Fraser in in Dad's Army.

John Laurie14:55

Well, it comes right, doesn't it, at the end of a long-ish career when one's getting a bit worn and one's voice isn't quite what it was and one's memory is practically non-existent. It's delightful to have eight years with nice fellas playing just a few lines and some of them are very good. And I think it's the nicest possible kind of pension anybody could have.

Presenter15:17

Good, let's have record number five.

John Laurie15:19

Record number five is uh

John Laurie15:22

Oh.

John Laurie15:23

Yes, I've got to mark Sundays, because I think it's nice to make Sunday different, even all alone. So I've decided to mark it by

John Laurie15:32

playing the

John Laurie15:33

23rd Psalm. This is something which has been with me.

John Laurie15:37

Ever since my ears were opened, I must have been one of the first tunes I ever heard, because father was always

John Laurie15:43

singing and playing hymns and things.

Speaker 215:50

Are you sure?

Speaker 215:55

And what wants in place in the love?

Speaker 115:59

Yeah.

Speaker 216:09

In my

Presenter16:39

The Glasgow Orpheus Choir, the Cremon setting of the twenty third Psalm.

Presenter16:43

A very important part of your career which we haven't touched on is your verse reading. That means a lot to you, doesn't it?

John Laurie16:49

Ah, yes.

John Laurie16:51

We have got such a precious heritage.

John Laurie16:55

in our words as the poets have put them together.

John Laurie16:59

And I have always had pleasure in speaking verse. Perhaps Miss Fogarty at the Central School

John Laurie17:05

developed this to a degree where I consider myself one of the better verse speakers.

John Laurie17:11

and I don't consider myself the better of much else, but I do have a kind of pride

John Laurie17:16

In the fact that I speak the ballads, for instance Scots ballads.

John Laurie17:20

Perhaps. Yes. Yes, I'm good to say it. I speak them better than anybody else alive, as long as my breath gives uh doesn't give out.

Presenter17:27

and you were one of the early disciples of William McGonagall.

John Laurie17:30

Ah, yes. That was funny. Uh we used to do these lovely recitals all over the place, the Apollo Society. We used to find it difficult to finish up on a gay note.

John Laurie17:43

And I suddenly thought old McConnegal, then that'll make em laugh.

John Laurie17:47

I don't know how I first met the man, but that's how I started. And nobody was doing him then at all. So he came as a great surprise. What's your next record? Here I'm going to be very, very egotistical.

John Laurie17:59

And have a record of me.

John Laurie18:01

Doing

John Laurie18:03

A poem which has become associated with him because I think I've spoken this poem.

John Laurie18:07

This little lyric of Bansy's

John Laurie18:10

all over the world.

John Laurie18:13

Oh, my love's like a reed reed rose That's newly sprung in June.

John Laurie18:18

Oh, my love's like the melody That's sweetly played in tune

John Laurie18:23

As fair art thou, my bonny lass

John Laurie18:26

Say deep in love am I

John Laurie18:29

And I will love thee still, my dear, till all the seas gone dry.

John Laurie18:36

Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt with the sun.

John Laurie18:42

I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands o' life so rent

John Laurie18:49

And fare thee will, my only love.

John Laurie18:53

And fare thee will awhile.

John Laurie18:56

And I will come again, my love.

John Laurie19:00

though it was ten thousand miles.

Presenter19:06

My love is like a red, red, rose.

John Laurie19:08

Just a minute. Before I we go on any farther, I must explain that I've really chosen that poem so that I shall not forget how to speak my native Scots.

Presenter19:18

As a much travelled man, John, have you some ideas on looking after yourself on a desert island?

John Laurie19:22

I would have been very good.

John Laurie19:24

It's an academic question to ask of an old man who'll be

John Laurie19:27

Seventy nine next seventy nine next birthday. Uh whether he's got got any ideas of remaining another twenty years alive. But I was one of the first King Scouts in Scotland.

John Laurie19:41

I'm talking about sixty years ago, seventy years ago.

John Laurie19:45

This was a great honour, and it meant.

John Laurie19:47

That I could look after myself on a barren rock, practically. So I'm going to pretend I've got that aptitude. Number seven.

John Laurie19:57

Well, here I become totally sentimental.

John Laurie20:01

Tristan and Isolda, please.

Presenter20:03

Which part of it?

John Laurie20:05

The love, death, motif.

John Laurie20:07

is is the heart of the thing.

John Laurie20:09

and it comes straight away at the beginning of the overture.

Presenter21:09

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde recorded at the Bayreuth Festival in 1966.

Presenter21:15

What's your last record going to be?

John Laurie21:17

Well, this again is sentimental. My goodness, I'm only realizing now how full of sentiment this programme is. Well, that, I suppose, tells you something about me which I've not spoken about. Anyway, this I've got to speak about, because it is a tune which again has haunted me.

John Laurie21:33

And again, I remember my mother so very, very well. She really was a wonderful woman.

John Laurie21:39

And it takes me back.

John Laurie21:41

Vorschak's Songs My Mother Taught Me.

Speaker 222:15

Oh ten.

Presenter22:35

Songs My Mother Taught Me by Joan Hammond.

Presenter22:38

And if you could take only one disc of the eight you've played us, which would it be?

John Laurie22:42

The Elgar is so marvellous.

John Laurie22:45

And he's got a poem there too.

John Laurie22:47

That that's what I'll take.

Presenter22:49

Elgars, the music makers, and one luxury to take with you.

John Laurie22:53

A funny one.

John Laurie22:54

I see myself

John Laurie22:56

uh getting a bit lonely at nights and perhaps a little frightened.

John Laurie23:01

So I want something that's going to help me to read at night.

John Laurie23:06

And it's going to help my poor old eyes as well, double purpose. It's a very handsome big reading glass that lights up, and you'll give me a pocketful of batteries, please, to keep it going, so that I can read by day or by night.

Presenter23:20

And what are you going to read? Which one work, one book are you going to choose apart from that little list, the Bible, Shakespeare and the Encyclopedia?

John Laurie23:27

Well, the encyclopedias. It was really the Bible and Shakespeare, because with these two, one doesn't really need much else. But.

John Laurie23:34

I've always been a word man, so if you'll be kind enough to let me have the two-volume Oxford Dictionary,

John Laurie23:41

And me and my big, beautiful reading glass I'm set for life.

Presenter23:45

That will be organized, and thank you, John Laurie, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

John Laurie23:49

Well, you've been very kind. Thank you, Roy.

Presenter23:52

Goodbye everyone.

Speaker 123:59

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