Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actress, entertainer, and authoress.
On the island
Eight records
I am an optimist, you see, so therefore I would be looking on the right side and hoping that somebody was going to come and rescue me. One of my favourite male singers is Tony Bennett. I've had the pleasure of working with him in strange places like South America. And so this record ... I think is an optimistic message from someone like Tony Bennett.
TomorrowFavourite
That is a marvellous song from the show Annie, which I confess I haven't seen, but I think this song, the way it's sung by any child, just pulls the heartstrings of any adult. It certainly does mine. And although I was never a child like Annie, it sort of takes me back to my childhood.
Well, this was a lady who was singing at around that time and is still singing and I think is quite unique. And that's Peggy Lee. ... I love the song and I love her. I always have.
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Well, this is a classic piece by one of my favourite classic composers, Sibelius. ... I remember that when Dennis and I were first starting out in our marriage together, and we had no money, and he was promising to make me that big star. It was one of the pieces of classical music that we used to play, and it's always been a favourite of mine.
Well, Johnny Mathis has always been a a great favourite of mine, and I remember those early days in Hollywood in the in the sixties when I was living there, and it see I I was listening to Johnny Mathis then, and I'm still listening to him and loving him, and Well, it's a different back cloth of my life now, but he's still the same.
Pavane pour une infante défunte
Oh, this is a very sad piece of music, which I've always been rather partial to.
This is a piece of music called Volstrist. My father used to play this on the piano, and I remember, apart from the fact that I liked the melody, because once again I suppose a little bit like the last record we have, which is it has a sad, wistful quality, I think the story, unless I'm very much mistaken, is about a woman Who dies and she dances with her son around this ballroom? for the last time before she dies in his arms.
This song, The Way We Were, was from a film called The Way We Were with Barbara Streisand, which I thought was a beautiful film. I love Barbara Streisand singing this song. In fact, I love anyone who sings this song because It has such nostalgic feelings for me, and indeed I do it myself in my own cabaret act, interwoven with another song called My Way ... but I think uh Memories, The Way We Were, in this particular instance, by Gladys Knight, who I think does a marvellous job on it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:17Tell me about your parents. Were they interested in the theatre, in music?
Well, they were both very interested in it. My father was an extremely talented pianist who could have become professional ... But he was a very sensible man, and he preferred a secure, comfortable, quiet existence ... My mother trained as a singer ... and they both did a great deal of uh amateur theatricals ... as I was an only child and I wasn't born until she was forty two, I think she lived out a lot of her fantasies in me. She was a great cinema fan. She took me to the cinema when I was three. ... And that's where my first love of films and the lure of Hollywood started.
Presenter asks
5:34What was the first professional job you did?
When I was fourteen I was taking my silver medal for acting ... and the adjudicator was a a film casting director called Eric LePine Smith. And he not only awarded me my silver medal, but he said that he had a small part that I could play in a film called The Shop at Sly Corner ... He said, But for goodness sake, don't tell the director that you're only fourteen because it's the part of the Spivves girlfriend. ... So we kept it a secret until I'd finished the film and then we told the director, who couldn't believe it.
Presenter asks
8:18Did [being a young contract artist with the Rank Organisation] mean you had to go to what the press called the Charm School?
The keepsakes
The book
Diana Dors
Well, I know it's perhaps an egotistical thing to do, but I think I would take my autobiography because if I died on the island, and whoever found me that skeleton that'd be lying there at least they'd know in centuries to come who I was and all about me from my autobiography.
Yes, well when we were not actually filming, we were required to attend what was originally called the Company of Youth. In other words, they were all Mr. Rank's young starlets ... who were supposed to be taught at that school to act and do all the things that I had just spent two years at Lambda doing, so I found it a dreadful waste of time.
Presenter asks
9:05What was the first film in which you played a leading part?
That was a film called Diamond City. I was seventeen and I'd made countless films by then ... And Gene Kent was set to star in this film ... Jean Kent suddenly decided she'd had enough of playing these sort of parts ... They looked around, quickly thought, now who can we get to play this? But oh, of course it has to be Diana Dawes because she plays all the bad girls. So in I went ... trying to play some sort of hard-bitten saloon floozy of thirty-five at least ... But it was my first starring role, and I had the excitement of seeing my name up in lights in Piccadilly
Presenter asks
17:33When did you go to the United States for the first time?
In 1956, I sat around after Yeal to the Night had been acclaimed ... waiting for another wonderful part like that to be offered, and nothing came. And finally I received an offer to go to Hollywood ... But I never really attained the success in Hollywood that I had managed to achieve over here. And the simple reason was that there was a lady called Marilyn Munro. No one in America had ever seen anything that I had done, and they all thought that I was some British blonde who'd copied Marilyn Munro and jumped onto that publicity bandwagon.
Presenter asks
23:30What have been the career highlights in recent years?
A few years ago you had a straight play success with Three Months Gone. ... we opened at the Royal Court Theatre in nineteen seventy ... It was an overnight success ... Suddenly from having had a very bad career time in the late sixties ... I suddenly opened up a whole new decade for myself in character roles. ... you can always go on playing character roles you can't continue playing blonde glamour girls.
“I grew up with this sort of silly romantic idea that uh if a man took you out for the evening, apart from buying you an orchid to pin on your or dress and uh buying you champagne and caviar, he actually probably took you home and did a tap dance around the lamppost or sang you a song in the moonlight.”
“And so suddenly at eighteen I was a has been before I'd been anywhere.”
“The seventies, personally, for me, were a ghastly time, but professionally they did open up a whole new decade, and one which I think and hope will go on until the day I die, because, you see, you can always go on playing character roles you can't continue playing blonde glamour girls.”