Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
BAFTA-winning actress best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral, The English Patient, and The Horse Whisperer.
On the island
Eight records
the first time I heard this was it's very romantic. I was I just met my well, future husband. I was very young and we were driving to and he's French and we were driving to his grandmother's country house in Normandy by the sea and it was very dark and it was this old Peugeot Quatsen Catre with a leaking roof and you know, we were both madly in love and this was on the tape deck and it just reminds me of sort of the smell of old leather and being tremendously in love and and going to the seaside and it just being perfect.
I love this because well, I just love it. It's just a great, great, great song. You can't help but feel sort of uplifted and encouraged by it somehow. It's a good song.
Morgen!Favourite
my mummy had a record of this. I remember the picture of it. It was a big L P and I just loved it. W it was always faintly frightening and mysterious and so beautiful.
Stuttgart Chamber Choir and Tafelmusik
it's a v it is pretty unheard of, maybe justifiably so, I don't know, but I think it's great.
which is actually the soundtrack from this film. In which I dance, which is not to be missed.
Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer
Blaenavon Male Voice Choir and the Regimental Band of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers
which is a wonderful hymn. Sung, I think, by a lot of men in rugby grounds, I love crowd singing. And the next best thing to a crowd singer is a choir singing. I think it's very important on your desert island to have lots of voices.
John Martin is a is an amazing, amazing singer and guitarist. This I think comes from his maybe it's his first recording or his second, one of his very early recordings. And it's Spencer the Rover, which is a traditional song, but it's such a beautiful rendition.
Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Op. 8: Adagio
André Previn, Viktoria Mullova and Heinrich Schiff
It's a lovely piece of music because it's it can be melancholy when you want to be melancholy and it can be very sort of Um invigorating or When when you need to Yeah, pull yourself together.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:23Do you really prefer the stage [to film]?
I don't know whether I prefer it yet because I've only done two productions really. But it is so different. It is so different. Somehow it's more exhausting being on stage, but it's also you have an immediate satisfaction which you don't get working on film. The sort of satisfaction comes months later. But the immediacy of the theatre is much more exciting.
Presenter asks
5:45Is there any of Fiona [from Four Weddings and a Funeral] in you?
Uh yeah, I mean, I've got a bit of a forked tongue sometimes. Um But no, I I love that character because I just I I just love the idea of her sort of unrequited love and and sort of declaring it and being rather gauchely put back in one's place. And being from feeling and I love the idea of playing a character who felt superior, or gave the impression that she felt superior, but in fact didn't feel up to the mark at all. I I like that.
Presenter asks
9:52As a girl who lost her father and indeed her stepfather in plane crashes, was it difficult to play Catherine Clifton dead in a light plane?
It was difficult to have to get in a plane and pretend I was dead. Because, you know, immediately you sort of think, Oh, God, I wonder what it's really like to be dead in a plane, or I wonder what you think before you die in a plane, and all those things sort of. Bring back Thoughts that I'd rather not think about. Yeah, it was tough. That was that was actually tough.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
11:18Your father died when you were five and your stepfather when you were eleven; they must have been two completely different experiences?
Completely different experiences but at the same time the second echoing horrifically the first. And being a l that little bit older. Having to deal with it by not dealing with it, because in those days, this was a long time ago. You just didn't deal, and you just sort of went on. And I think that nowadays people have. Grief counselling and God knows what else, and I think that that is probably quite useful. I don't know. We didn't. We just sort of I went back to school.
Presenter asks
18:20Why do you say that starting your acting in France was a kind of cheating?
Well, because I did. I was at drama school there. I was at drama school for three years and I started to work. I had very small parts in films and. one or two very small parts in in plays and then Suddenly I I I was doing a Marguerite Duras play in the South in Burgundy, and I got this call from the casting director saying Prince is coming to France and he's going to make a film and they're making it in English, so they're looking for English speaking actresses. So I whizzed up to Paris, Which absolutely stunned me. Would I be interested in auditioning for the leading role? And I thought it had all been cast, of course it had been cast, but they decided to recast. And so I did, and then I got it. And it was extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary
Presenter asks
28:09How difficult has the working mother bit been?
Oh, it's a nightmare. Yeah. Well, any working mother is a nightmare. It's very, very difficult, but wouldn't do it any other way.
“Because I'm English I feel I can get away with it somehow. You have a kind of excuse to be more mysterious and it somehow removes it from criticism because it's foreign, because it's got an added twist to it, it's got a different take on it or something like that.”
“I think that everybody has their own baggage, their own stuff that they bring.”
“I can only be on my own for about, I would say, maximum twelve hours. Yeah. I find that's thing of a thing about working is that I when I I love ta I love saying, Oh, I'm not going to work for the next few months and then after a while I really need to have uh conversations with people and I need any sort of artistic stimulation or whatever you like to call it, but I need some kind of argument to happen.”