Robert Hardy

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 20:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

This week our castaway is the actor, Robert Hardy.

Presenter0:36

Can you think of any one consolation for being ruined on a desert island?

Presenter0:40

Yes. I would very much at this moment like to be marooned on a desert island. I'm uh

Presenter0:46

Fairly tired after doing thirteen episodes of my current television series. Riding Over the Dales.

Speaker 20:50

Can I use

Robert Hardy0:51

Riding over

Presenter0:53

Yes. I uh can't even make up my mind whether to have a holiday or not, so if Nature took a hand and threw me up on a desert island I should be extremely grateful. It would be a great consolation.

Presenter1:04

Your series, All Creatures Great and Small, is set in Yorkshire. Yorkshire isn't your native county, is it? No, it isn't. What part of the country do you come from? I come from the Welsh borders.

Robert Hardy1:10

What part of the country do you come from?

Presenter1:13

I was actually born in Gloucestershire, but um largely brought up in Shropshire and that's where home thoughts from abroad tend to direct themselves. Is there any precedent in your family for the theatre or the art in general?

Robert Hardy1:25

No.

Presenter1:26

No, there isn't. None at all.

Presenter1:31

Yes, I think it must have been. I've always tried to pretend I was somebody else when I was by myself. I'd be impersonating other people. But but I've never been able to give a very intelligent or amusing answer to that question, which is often asked of actors, of course. In fact, it was somebody else who put their finger on it for me when I was still at school and I was learning the violin from a most remarkable and enchanting Belgian called Alfred de Reger, who's still teaching. He teaches in Ireland now. At that time he was teaching at the school I was at and uh

Presenter2:05

He early realized that there wasn't much future in my violin play.

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and, having seen me in our school play or two, he said, You know, you won't make

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A very good uh violinist, but uh you should be an actor.

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And from that moment on I I took a conscious

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Part in the

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the decision to become one. You never play the violin, Nardid? No, alas, I don't. I went on until I was in the forces, and then it caused such pain and meant getting up so early.

Presenter2:36

to do it, that I I gave it up. I brought the fiddle that I owned to London when I first came to London, Snack, and I sold it and lived on it for quite a time.

Presenter2:45

To my bitter regret now, because I would still love to have it. Yes, that's rather sad. What's your first record?

Presenter2:51

After the trauma of being shipwrecked and cast up delighted, as I said a moment ago, I would be to be on a desert island I will need, I think, something to calm my nerves

Presenter3:05

Schubert was the earliest composer I came to love as a very young

Presenter3:12

Lad

Presenter3:13

And it seems to me that Symphony Number Two, particularly if we can hear it, the second movement, the Andante and variations, is the most calming piece of music.

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and a marvellous illustration of his

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Incredible gift of melody.

Presenter4:33

The opening of the second movement, the Andante, from Schubert's Second Symphony in B flat. You said you were in the services, um, when you sadly gave up the fiddle. You were in the Royal Air Force in the latter part of the war. Yes, I was, yes. Now that was in the middle of your

Presenter4:51

OXFORD CAREEER

Presenter4:53

Yes. I knew I was going into the forces before I g

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left school, but it was at that particular time when if I think one was a volunteer

Presenter5:02

Uh one was allowed.

Presenter5:05

If one was going on to university later, to go for, I think it was known as the Y scheme, six months to the university, and you did half university work and half forces work. What were you reading? I read English literature. Yes, and a lot of university drama, of course. Not at that time. I didn't do much. I did later, when I went back after the war was over, I did a great deal of drama then. But I think it was partly because I was too shy. I met Richard Burton, do you see, at Oxford in that first six months? And when you met Richard Burton, you didn't think that you were a particularly good actor. What about your second period there? Were they good years as far as dramatic talent was concerned? Yes, yes. In every way, they were good years. They were absolutely marvellous years that the war was done. It was quite ravishing to get back.

Presenter5:54

To a place like Oxford.

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And there were extraordinary people there connected with the theatre. Ken Tynan was there, Peter Brooke was there, both at uh my college. Oddly enough. What happened to you when you came down?

Presenter6:06

I went straight to Stratford. Who was the boss in in that era? At Stratford Ten Aquary. It was his first year. 1949. He started in 49 and I stayed three years there. Including the Australian tour at that time. Yes, which was between forty-nine and fifty, I think. Yes, it was. After three years there, well, I was lucky and

Presenter6:26

enough to get up the ladder a little bit, playing reasonably good parts. Richard Burton comes back into one's life at this point. He was playing Henry V and I was playing, for instance, Fluellyn with his Henry the Fifth. Uh then I went to uh to London.

Presenter6:39

With uh John Gilgood, who thought uh

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I was useful performer and gave him my first chance really as a juvenile in in uh much do about nothing.

Speaker 46:49

Yeah.

Presenter6:49

Yes. A marvellous production which he'd started in nineteen forty nine at Stratford. And your first modern play?

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Her followed immediately afterwards. It was a Charles Morgan play.

Presenter7:02

the river line.

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And you did several years with the Elvic?

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I did two seasons, I think.

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Yes. Some short time after that. After my modern play, I forget why things went wrong, but they did. I didn't get many jobs. I suppose people thought I was pretty bad, really. That's usually the reason actors don't get jobs. And uh not for the last time I was rescued by the man who influenced me most in the theatre, I suppose. Tyrone Guthrie. He is a great man.

Robert Hardy7:33

Yeah, it's great.

Presenter7:36

It gave me my first job at the Vic, and I then stayed on.

Robert Hardy7:36

Yeah, mm

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And then you had a spell of uh an American period.

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Yes, I did. I went out with an Emily Williams play in which I was abominable.

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to New York.

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And there I met

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My wife Sally.

Presenter7:54

Yes. Whereby hang many tales. It's time we have another record. What next? This is a very romantically associated record. It's uh a musical called The House of Flowers, which for some extraordinary reason was never a great success in New York and was never, I think, ever produced in in London. Uh Capote, Truman Capote wrote the words, and Harold Arlen the uh music. And I'd like to have it with me to remind me of New York and to remind me of

Presenter8:25

meeting Sally and

Presenter8:27

starting to pursue her across the Atlantic one, two, three times.

Robert Hardy8:30

When you fly into high, like birds sweep in the sky, and pose make you to pause, they may in reason and cause to ladies in the shade of the banana tree, how delectable desire us they can be, in the black like shade of the banana tree.

Presenter8:57

Two ladies in the shade of the banana tree from House of Flowers, appropriately tropical for a desert island, and it reminds you of meeting your wife Sally, who is, of course, the daughter of the late Dame Gladys Cooper.

Presenter9:10

Which makes you the brother-in-law of Robert Morley, doesn't it? Yes, an alarming thought.

Presenter9:15

I think if I'm proud of anything in my career, it's uh having survived the uh galaire onto which I married. Right. Now after your American period, as it were, you went back to Stratford, but this time to play leading parts.

Presenter9:33

Yes, that was after some time, something like two and a half years, in America, both in New York and in California.

Presenter9:39

which was a a marvellous time of my life. Yes. And then again Tyrone Guthrie sent a telegram.

Presenter9:46

saying, Come back and play the King of France for me and all's well, which I did and stayed for the censenary year of fifty-nine.

Presenter9:55

But the biggest leading part of all, you you haven't played in this country, but only in America. That's right. And now it's too late to t t to do it here.

Presenter10:04

Hamlet I did play i in America. It was a very, very, very thrilling, exhausting um time because I was alternating Hamlet and Henry V in an auditorium which held something over three thousand people. Not the easiest place to do it. And the the the beginning of Hamlet was attended by a sort of disaster because the uh the night before we opened we did one of those public dress rehearsals when people are invited a few hundreds to watch and in the duel with Laertes at the uh end of the play.

Presenter10:35

We got rather heated. A Laoti's sword broke, but a foot broke off the end of it on a parry by my head, and the spinning fragment cut my forehead open. Jeeas missed my eye

Presenter10:49

And I retired to the

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gentle hands of a plastic surgeon called doctor Morrison D. Beers, who put in twenty six stitches, and more than that.

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Attended every performance that I gave of Hamlet for and the other part for the next uh week to put on some special any newly discovered unguent uh as a prophylactic to cover the stitches and make sure that I wasn't infected. The most splendid man. So you were playing Hamlet and R Henry the Fifth with twenty-six stitches in your forehead. Yes, I don't think it improved the performances of either character.

Presenter11:23

We got through somehow. Record number three.

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Record number three is a very, very theatrical

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Choice, I think it's the most theatrical piece of music that I know, and I must have something with me to remind me of theatre when there is no theatre on my island.

Presenter11:40

Uh it's also

Presenter11:42

Responsible for the most exciting night I've ever spent in the theatre, it's Prokofievs, Romeo and Juliet.

Presenter12:48

An excerpt from the Procoffee of Ballet Music, Romeo and Juliet, Lorraine Marzell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra.

Presenter12:56

You haven't done a great deal of stage work in recent years, have you, Robert?

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But you've been very active in television. When did that start?

Presenter13:03

My very first television, I think, was when I was still at Stratford, nineteen fifty one, it was

Presenter13:08

Practically hand-cranked cameras. Um but for the record I think that was my first um my first um major television was uh way back in the days when the BBC decided to do classic serials and I played Copperfield in David Copperfield. Have you been in some very successful serials and series? An Age of Kings for example and uh Elizabeth R. You played Leicester?

Presenter13:35

and that excellent series, Edward the Seventh.

Presenter13:38

Yes, quite lately.

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You delight in researching historical parts, don't you? Yes, I do. I do. It's given rise to all sorts of side interests, looking at things about characters or about the period that one is concerned with in a play.

Presenter13:54

And a number of modern series, the the troubleshooters. And one here, Manhunt. What was Manhunt about? I don't remember that one. It was about uh a group of allied um soldiers name and escaping from the war. But I had a I had a ball with that. I played a little uh character who was based on an actual man, an intelligence man in the Upwaire called um in the in the play. It was Sergeant Graz. In fact, he was a corporal and his name was Bleicher. I had a chance then to meet him, but I gathered he was very different from me physically, so I I turned it down.

Presenter14:25

And you've been in rather an interesting series, which you mentioned just now. We'll talk about that in a minute. Let's have another record.

Presenter14:31

Well, this next choice connects with all sorts of side interests which are to do really with my endlessly researching things. Ah.

Presenter14:43

When I was going to play Henry the Fifth I started researching.

Presenter14:47

in tour, bows and arrows, battles, terrain, characters concerned, and that sort of thing. And I already had by then a great love of France and the French language.

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I

Presenter14:59

I had been much influenced by anything that Laurence Olivia did as an actor.

Presenter15:04

and absolutely thrown for a loop by his Henry the Fifth. film, which I saw I think I'm right in saying twenty one times. I've told him that twenty one times anyway, and he never believes it, but it's true. And the music by Walton I found ravishing.

Presenter15:22

The music that Walton wrote for the beginning of the kind of jolly part the the leading up to the the wedding, at the end, the happy end of the play, after all the battle is done, was actually taken from an Auvergne folk song

Presenter15:37

And the original in medieval French and local, very local French, is on That Splendid Record by Vittoria de Rosin-Giles. That I would want to have with me.

Presenter16:48

One of the songs of the Auvergne sung by Victoria Los Angeles.

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Now all creatures, great and small,

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Siegfried, the the character you play, is indeed a living character, and you've been out on his rounds with him, haven't you? Siegfried. The man on wh the splendid, lovely, enchanting, humorous, kind, generous man on whom

Presenter17:11

The character in the book is based indeed lives and thrives, and I'm proud to say that.

Robert Hardy17:16

Yeah.

Presenter17:19

I I know him a little and I have been out on his rounds with him. Now this series is right up your street because you are a countryman, aren't you not? By view I'm a bumpkin by nature, yes. You like to live surrounded by animals. Yes, I do. In fact you keep horses yourself and dogs and hens and all sorts of kind of thing, yes.

Robert Hardy17:29

You would like to learn.

Robert Hardy17:32

Yeah.

Robert Hardy17:34

That kind of thing.

Presenter17:35

You've recently wrapped up the thirteen instalments of all creatures, great and small. There are some more to come, are there not?

Presenter17:42

Yes, we start quite soon again, uh filming. There are going to be another thirteen.

Presenter17:47

And we go to Yorkshire.

Robert Hardy17:47

And

Presenter17:50

Wensdale, Swelldale's a marvellous part of the world and the people thereof.

Presenter17:55

More music. What next?

Presenter17:57

The Brahms double concerto for violin and and cello seems to me to represent I don't want to get uh programmy about it, but it to me it represents more

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About

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The relationship of two creatures. Call it, if you like, how a marriage can come to be, how a friendship can work, how a cooperation through

Presenter18:22

battle and uh disagreement can be made to work in human terms. It seems that that is all there and ravishingly thought out in the Brahms double concerta.

Presenter19:36

An excerpt from the Brahms double concerto, David Ostrach and Rostropovich, with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Sell. Now, you talked about your researches before playing Henry the Fifth. This led to your very great interest in archery.

Presenter19:54

Now the longbow, which has become really something of an obsession with you, was a tremendously effective weapon. Yes, indeed it was. What was the effective range?

Presenter20:03

I believe that the range must have been three hundred yards, but perhaps a little bit more than that, with the very heavy bows that the skilled, trained, experienced, and strong archers were asked to pull. And the rate of fire?

Robert Hardy20:08

The b

Presenter20:17

Well, this I know can be up to twenty arrows in a minute if you start doing the mathematics after that. Yes. So if you get three thousand or four thousand archers shooting twenty arrows in a minute, this is a bit daunting, isn't it?

Robert Hardy20:23

Yeah, we should

Robert Hardy20:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Presenter20:31

All this knowledge you've put into a book called Longbow, which is really the definitive work now.

Presenter20:37

Well, it's very kind of said. I rather doubt if many people would accept that, but uh

Presenter20:41

Um yes. There's a b definitive book somewhere coming out. It's coming out of me. I'm perfectly sure. It may take another ten years to do it. But I've got to find a publisher who doesn't say you can't write more than a hundred thousand words. Well, that sounds a bit daunting.

Presenter20:56

Desk number six. I'd like to have with me something for the solo violin.

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played by an absolute master, an unequalled player in my view.

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So I I'd I've chosen the

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Paganini.

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Uh caprices, twenty-four caprices. I'd love to hear one of them, and I'll tell you why I'd like to hear one particularly, because if you listen very carefully.

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Just before the violin starts, I believe you may hear

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What's actually also going on in the back of my memory mind stranded on that desert island?

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which ties up with the particular piece that Yitzhak Perlman will play.

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the ninth of the Paganini twenty four Caprice.

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And that hunting horn was definitely not on Itzak Perlman's disc.

Presenter22:48

Now, what are your qualifications, Robert, for being a castaway? Could you put up a hut?

Presenter22:53

Yes, I think I could put up a hut. Um I've never tried that Boy Scout business of making fire without a box of matches, I'm ashamed to say. But I believe it. It surely can work. I suppose I could make fires. Uh I could look after myself reasonably well, I fancy. You can cultivate as a countryman. Yes. Would you try to escape? Could you construct some kind of craft?

Robert Hardy23:08

You can count it.

Presenter23:14

I believe in the end, yes. Do you know anything about navigation? Well, of course you do, the REO. I've forgotten it all. One used to do it by the stars in those days. I I The stars are still there. They're still there, but they keep moving, don't they? One has to remember that.

Robert Hardy23:23

Press

Robert Hardy23:25

Remember that.

Presenter23:26

I should keep turning to the right, shouldn't I, or the left, in my dug out canoe. Don't ask me. I d I might become so enamoured of the whole business of being alone and keeping on listening to these records that I might want to stay there, I'm not sure. What would be the next one you would listen to?

Presenter23:40

In that hot climate

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And because I love

Presenter23:45

Almost everything he wrote.

Presenter23:48

I would want to hear something very northern.

Presenter23:51

Very cold something by Sebelius. And of all the things that he wrote, I believe the single movement symphony, the last one, is the seventh, is the greatest.

Presenter25:02

The closing passage of the Sibelia's Seventh Symphony, Sir Thomas Beacham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Which brings you to your last disk.

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My last disc must be something by.

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Beat heaven.

Presenter25:17

And I laid up some years ago for the next time I was in hospital, perhaps for good and all, or my old age, I laid up the complete quartets. I thought they're the hardest music that I know to understand completely. They most profoundly reflect a great composer's philosophy, comprehension of life, comprehension and mastery of music.

Presenter25:44

And my favourite of all the quartets is

Presenter25:48

I think at the moment, anyway, it may change, I suppose. A's number one hundred and thirty, B major.

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And my favorite movement.

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Is the fifth movement, the Cavatina, which, as you know, is

Presenter26:05

in some measure his his uh

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Great heavens.

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Thankfulness for recovering from an illness.

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I

Presenter26:13

should be in a position on that island to be extremely thankful that I'm alive.

Presenter26:17

and whether on an island or not, I constantly

Presenter26:22

wake up in the morning to be thankful that I am alive. So the Cavatina offers my thanks to

Presenter26:32

Whatever, for being here.

Presenter27:36

The opening of the fifth movement, the Cavatina, from Beethoven's Quartet, opus 130 and

Presenter27:42

B major, played by the Amadeus Quartet.

Presenter27:46

If you would only take one of your eight records, which would it be?

Presenter27:50

It would be the maidhaven.

Presenter27:51

And you're allowed to take one luxury with you.

Presenter27:55

I thought the best way not to be entirely alone is to have a picture, and I wanted to take uh a big portrait or a miniature, a Hilliard or something like that, with me. But then I was talking to a photographer the other day on this very point, and he said, You don't f a picture. Imagine a frame leaning up against a palm tree, it looked perfectly absurd. You ought to take a statue, you ought to have a statue there. So I thought about various statues, and I opted for that absolutely exquisite female head which comes from Arsos.

Presenter28:24

Which is alas cut off at the neck. But I think that's not a bad idea. It could sit in the sand. I could imagine that I wasn't alone. I could imagine that.

Presenter28:32

The head went on under the sand. It's the most marvellously cut, although it lacks its nose, poor thing. Head, a superb calm eye, a perfectly beautiful mouth and jawline, and I think that would keep me company. Write your female head to stand in the sand. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island, and we've put the ban on big encyclopedias.

Presenter29:02

I have an inordinate love for the language of France.

Presenter29:05

And if I was unable to translate, which is how I keep my French such as it is going, I constantly translate as I'm driving along of thoughts that are going through my head into French from English.

Presenter29:17

And if I got stuck for a word, I think I should go absolutely mad and run off the island straight into the water, finally. So, if it doesn't break the rule, may I have a rather good French dictionary? The biggest and best we can find. Thank you. And thank you, Robert Hardy, for letting us hear your desert island disc. Thank you very much for inviting me to your island. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 229:47

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