Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Stage and film actor.
On the island
Eight records
I fell in love with this man's voice. It's the most ... musical voice I think I've ever heard from anyone.
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 'Pastoral' (Slow Movement)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler
I've chosen Beethoven's Symphony No. Six, the Pastoral Symphony, and I think the Slow Movement, because that's the one where I can imagine myself lying on my back in a hay field ... just looking at the clouds drifting by.
Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043
This has interested me in the works of Bach, because he's such a mathematical composer. And so I can't resist taking to my island with me this record of Bach's double violin concerto, because I hope by the end of my stay there I will at least have been able to understand it and work it out mathematically.
Here you have somebody singing about the country that they love and an exile, and as I on a desert island would be an exile, I like to associate myself with Bjoring singing here about Sweden.
We went into the theatre ... And we went there. We found ourselves dancing. Absolutely dancing. I have never enjoyed myself in the theatre so much. And at the end of the performance every one in that audience came out singing and dancing into the streets.
Diana and I go to the opera a great deal, and of course over the years we've grown to love Verde, and to have the combination of Verde getting at work on a requiem is too wonderful to be true. I mean the theatricality of the Requiem Mass wonderful.
I know the joy ... of laughter ... and the therapeutic advantages of laughter. And we we're going to need this. We all need it. And I've chosen for the next record, I think, an amusing anecdote supremely told by Gerard Hofnong at the Oxford Union.
The Old Hundredth (All People That on Earth Do Dwell)
I've always been mad about the trumpet. I adore the sound of the trumpet. It excites me, it moves me, it makes me cry.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:25Did you have any inclination towards medical matters [given your father was a pharmacist]?
Oh, dear me, none at all. No, I'm afraid uh mm my childhood was blighted by the fact that I had asthma. That's why I missed school two or three days a week ... And academically, I was a complete dunce.
Presenter asks
4:17How did the theatre come into your life?
Not at all, not at all. Because my brother and sister were the two theatre-goers of the family, and that didn't interest me at all ... But it turned out that my cousin was an amateur actor ... And he was called up for the RAF in the middle of rehearsals, and he telephoned me and asked me if I would take on his part in an amateur production.
Presenter asks
15:39What do you remember about meeting John Ford?
Terrifying ... Irene and I were sitting there quite happily in the restaurant having lunch, when over to the table came a tall, gangling figure ... And Irene said, Oh, mister Ford, this is Donald Syndon ... I leapt to my feet and I said, How do you do? He just eyed me over ... And then he said, What do you think of your part? ... And Irene said, Well, you see, Donald is a is a serious actor, you know. Is is he? Ah, we'll soon knock the hell out of that. And he proceeded ... for the next six months to do so.
The keepsakes
The book
A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method
Banister Fletcher
I'm most interested in architecture, and if I can understand as much as that man knows
The luxury
A little painting of a Pieta by Hubert Robert
Nobody knows it. It's just my favorite little picture.
Presenter asks
18:33How did you feel when the Rank Organisation decided to draw its horns in?
Dirk Bogart and I were the last two to be pushed out ... And in 1960, suddenly a new breed of actor was required for the kitchen sink dramas ... And I was always being cast in the realm of the modern comedian, the light comedian. So there were no parts for me in the theatre ... nobody wanted me out on my ear.
Presenter asks
21:42Which has been the greatest challenge in the classic world?
Lear is the most wonderful to play. That's was an enormous challenge ... Othello was the most difficult ... But they pale into insignificance against not now darling. which is much, much more difficult.
“I can't envisage life without music, as a matter of fact. Well, but um although I'm totally tone deaf myself, I can't sing a note. I can tell immediately if anyone is a ooh, a ... Smidgin off turn, eh?”
“I was apprenticed as a joiner for five years. That's a lot of time. That was a statutory period.”
“I had never read a word of Shakspere up until that moment, and Agate thrust a volume of Shakspeare into my hands and said Read that and it was opened at Buckingham's Farewell from Henry the Eighth, and I read it obviously abysmally. And there was a long, long pause at the end, and Agate, with that strange lisp of his, said Yesh. Yes, he said. It's an interpretation. It's the wrong one, but it's an interpretation.”
“I'm a good sailor, but I don't want to know about it. I don't like the sea. When you asked me to do this, you see, I thought the idea of being on a desert island is too exciting to be true. I mean, I wouldn't want to escape at all. I'd stay there. Wonderful.”