Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An Emmy-winning actor best known for playing Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.
On the island
Eight records
the piece that represents the character that really changed my fortunes as an actor, because it suddenly elevated me from being an ordinary character actor to being a leading character actor.
at Grenham House boarding school in the early fifties when John, my brother and I, were there. We had to go swimming in the sea every Sunday. And we used to walk down to Minnes Bay from the school and the headmaster would be in the front of us boys and he would walk into the sea and no one was allowed to pause. However freezing the sea was, you had to walk in. And we used to hold hands and sing You'll Never Walk Alone as we walked into the icy sea.
I heard drumming that I had never heard before in modern jazz, and it just blew me away. But it's Take Five by Dave Brubeck, and it's the drum solo played by Joe Morello.
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35
When we were growing up he was fanatical about Tchaikovsky and he got his first stereo record player. It was brown and it was sort of fake leather. But this piece of music was the only one he ever played and it drove me bananas. I used to say to him, S Shut it up.
When I Fall in LoveFavourite
The first dinner we I saved up for in Rep, I took her to a Chinese restaurant. And about two or three o'clock in the morning, we were sitting on a bench in the middle of the shopping precinct. How romantic. And I launched into Napkin Coles When I Fall in Love.
Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622
I was in my car driving to the Barbican Theatre. and a piece of music came on the radio. That As I listened to it. I found myself weeping at the wheel, literally weeping. Then I had to pull off. I couldn't drive. It affected me that much so much so that I suddenly had an urge to play the instrument that I heard. And it was the clarinet.
Requiem in D minor, K. 626: Lacrimosa
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
takes me right back to my first performance in Amadeus at the Old Vic Theatre. Salieri is who I played, and Salieri has this great speech over this piece of music, and it affected me so much in performance that it's become for me every time I hear it.
a monastic chant. by Peter Abelard who he wrote which he wrote in the twelfth century, and it's David's lament, Planctus David, over the deaths in battle of Saul and Jonathan.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:27Is it true that you read all eighty of the stories that had been written about Hercule Poirot before beginning the role?
Yeah, well it's almost true. I I won't say I've read every single one, but I read, I would suppose, very close to the complete canon, and I literally set out to create only the character that Agatha Christie created, nothing else, and then spent um many, many, many weeks practising, practising, practising, practising.
Presenter asks
1:43How do you manage to put [the characters] away? Once they're real, where do they go?
When you're in your real life in a theater play, uh you have to lose them every night. You have to say goodbye to them every night, and you have to go home as yourself, otherwise… [My psychologist friend] said, Get back to yourself. Say who you are. Go through your details and come back to you. Practise that, because in time you can do it very quickly and get out. And I can now, and that's what I do. At the end of every performance I just look in the mirror and in twenty seconds I'm back to me now.
Presenter asks
6:45What sort of people do you remember [your parents] as, aside from the roles that they [played]?
Well, mum mum was very colourful. Dad was very dour, actually. Dad was a very, very serious man.
The keepsakes
The book
Brigitte Lardinois
a wonderful book of photographs of the twentieth century, of people, places, very evocative, so I could look at the whole the major century where I grew up and uh constantly be reminded of that.
The luxury
Clarinet with unlimited supply of reeds
My luxury would, I think, be my clarinet with an endless unlimited supply of reeds. I'd never get sick of the sound of my clarinet.
Presenter asks
8:48Can you remember that day [your parents] came and waved you goodbye [to boarding school]?
Oh, it was awful. saying goodbye at Victoria station, and from then we would get on the train, the steam train, to take us to Burchington, which seemed the other end of the world… Well, I hated it. I think if that school existed today it would be closed down.
Presenter asks
10:47Was there a moment of epiphany when you thought [acting] was for me?
No, well, there was a moment of epiphany, but I think it was the first time I got approval. But the moment of epiphany of knowing that that I wanted to become an actor actually happened on the side of the stage at the Royal Court Theatre. When I was eighteen… I saw all the lights coming down and the flats coming down, the scenery coming down, and I was watching this and I thought Wow… And it was magic, and I thought This is where I want to spend my life.
Presenter asks
30:45I've read various things over the years about your relationship with religion, that you've established a strong relationship and that it's hugely significant to you.
Yes, it is true. I went through a conversion experience in 1986. I've always believed if this is all we've got, then it's not very good… I was searching for something, and cutting a long story short, I wanted to read something that I knew was fact. So I read a letter from St. Paul, Paul to the Romans, and suddenly reading that. I saw a way of life to which I wished to adhere, something I'd been looking for all my life really, something beyond what just is around us.
“At the end of every performance I just look in the mirror and in twenty seconds I'm back to me now.”
“I've always regarded myself as a sort of outsider, even though I was born in Paddington. I didn't fit into the classic English Brit mode of boys with blond hair and all the rest of it.”
“you can possibly live with a lot of people, but there are very few you can't live without.”
“I know I get [my energy] from being with other people. So I'm not going to be very happy on my island, I don't think.”