Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An English actress, best known for her film roles in the 1960s and 1970s.
On the island
Eight records
because A I love Bessie Smith and B a good man is hard to find.
Concerto in D minor for Violin and Oboe, BWV 1060Favourite
Yehudi Menuhin and Leon Goossens
I like the violin and the oboe talking away to themselves and each other and I like the music.
I don't know, this this record has a lot of reverberations to me. It's the story I find fascinating. I love the way Felicianu sings it.
I had a hard time choosing which one on this album, but Desperado it is.
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581
I've had it quite a lot of lot of times in my life and listened to it and I love it.
I think she's just an absolutely wonderful singer. She moves me, she stirs me ... It's just so intensely real.
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 'Eroica'
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
We're going to start at the beginning.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:37Could you put up with your own company for a long, long time?
Well, I'm a great make doer. And I think I quite enjoyed, actually. I'd be busy trying to think about how I could get off, and I'd be busy looking at my books and reading my records, I think, and perhaps trying to connect with other people on other desert islands
Presenter asks
0:56How important in your life is music?
Oh, it's very important. I like it around me. I like it to be able to have Easy access to it. I like variety. Yes, music's important to me.
Presenter asks
7:46Was it worrying you that the live theatre had more or less disappeared out of your life at this time?
Well, yes, it did frighten me, because I had a sort of feeling that if I got to a certain point maybe there would be no return. Uh so I I I round about this time ... I went in to the live theatre and played um Millie Teal in Wings of the Dove
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Touring Club Italiano
Well, it hasn't got a title yet, but it's on it's about how people do psychology and how they have learnt to do psychology from the earliest days. And it's fascinating. I say I've only read five chapters of it, but it's fascinating. And I could put commas and so on in.
The luxury
pen and paper and unlimited ink
I would probably write a journal, but I might write a story or the un yetwritten screenplay or a book, but almost certainly a journal.
Were you being typecast a bit, then, as a sort of jolly blonde?
I never felt that it was particularly the jolly blonde. But I did always feel that I was being typecast as rather sweet young thing a bit. The sweet, nice Blond haired, blue eyed.
Presenter asks
10:23Playing those [explicit] scenes [in The Killing of Sister George] in front of a stage full of technicians must have needed a special kind of courage.
Oh God, it was so frightening, yes. I must say, Robert Aldrich was lovely and he did clear the set. But that, well, the particular scene that you're probably thinking of when Alice is seduced by Mercy Hasted played by Carl Brown, that was a very, very difficult one. He cleared the set for that. But in fact, that was only just one day in a whole three months of an absolutely lovely work period of my life.
Presenter asks
18:45Is there anything that you look back on with a real shudder? Something that really went up the spout?
Oh, not just something, an awful lot of things. Listen, I've done somebody told me, to my horror, that I've done nearly forty films. ... out of nearly forty films, I should say about ... Oh ... How many are there that you're really proud of? Maybe six or seven? Now there are some that are just sort of all right. But there are some real horrors, so I can't even point out one to you because there are too many.
“I remember getting my first laugh in a in a school play when I was nine as the elderly sister in Cinderella, and that that was absolute nectar.”
“I think the film itself [The Killing of Sister George] was really pretty crude and rough and fairly vulgar in in lots of ways, but it had a tremendous vitality and it was brave in the sense that it was the first of films on a homosexual theme, on a lesbian theme. And though it was, you know, brash and everything else, I loved doing it and I was proud of it.”
“I would want to describe the island and everything that was happening every day. Um also I would be writing my letters and putting them in the empty quink bottles and sending them off.”