YouSaid · the spoken record

Dame Joan Plowright

lines on the record: 25
first: 2006-08-27
most recent: 2006-08-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because it's epic it takes you such a long time to get to the end of one sentence and there is such a wonderful love affair between the boy and his grandmother, and as a grandmother now and with grandsons I recognise it and it's very moving that's the book That's the book Dame Joan Plowright, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs Thank you You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take, Joan? I would take the Mozart inlet I would spend the rest of my life getting the fingering right in other words I'm going to take a piano That's your luxury That is my luxury All right and that will I will practice that Mozart sonata for the rest of my life on the Desk Island and think of my grandchildren who will be sort of grown up young men and women then And you can take a book to read as well as well as the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare Yes indeed and I've decided after Longfill to take Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Paston Perdux”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very personal and to do with you, and it's your tapestry you are weaving. And you've learnt a great deal from it, and experienced great joy and sorrow, and that's all. That makes you a more rounded human being Lost Record The Last Record is I guess a kind of statement It Pierre, again a vulnerability, quite a tough life like Judy Garland, but emerged from it and it is atmospheric, remind you of cafes in France and sitting on the sidewalk and having coffee or perma and all the things at Paris's anyway Piaf.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could do it, of course, on your Your desert island and reflect on what's obviously been really quite not just a busy but a tumultuous life. Do you think when you sit on the sand and think about it, are you going to have any regrets?”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was Giuseppe di Stefano singing comfaceta mameta How do you do it, mamma and Neapolitan folk song Joan Plowwright More professional plans in the pipeline or are you spending more time with your grandchildren these days?”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was rehearsing. I was rehearsing for the end. Yes. Yeah. And have you felt Since his death seventeen years ago now, have you felt like the keeper of the flame, you know, different things have happened and odd mistresses have come out of the woodwork or there have been biographies written suggesting that he might have had homosexual liaisons and things. That must be very distressing, but have you felt it's fallen to you throughout this time to defend his memory?”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“playing part of the first movement of Mozart's piano sonata in C major. You said, Joan, that Larry could be very difficult, I think you once said, you know, you'd have died for him, but there were times when you didn't know how to live with him. And he got more difficult, didn't he as he got older because he became ill, I think he developed prostate cancer and a muscle wasting disease. There's a feeling that he really did rage against the dying of the light, didn't he?”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you did get married as we've heard, and you went on to have three children. What kind of father was he? Lawrence Olivia.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem would have been, though, wouldn't it, that the public would have been On the side of Vivian Lee, as it were, because they knew about her, and she would have looked vulnerable and she was older and maybe, you know, Olivier was leaving her for a younger woman. That would have been difficult for you to contend with because your relationship ran deeper than that, and it wasn't just another little affair, was it?”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was Maria from Westside Story with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein, who of course wrote West Side Story. Just tell me a little bit more, Joan, if you would, about the period of time between falling in love and getting married, because it must have been very difficult for you. Was the press very intrusive then?”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“because he came with his then wife Vivian Lee, didn't he? Yes, but by all accounts he was scared. Entranced by you from the very beginning.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Solivier delivering Henry V's some Crispin's Day speech from the 1944 film of the play. Great stuff. You met him for the first time backstage, he came backstage to congratulate you on a performance, didn't he? You must remember the moment.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The film was what about nineteen forty four, wasn't it? It was just before the end of the war. You'd again, you'd have been fifteen.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you did play BT Bryant in Wesker's roots, and she has a kind of angry speech at the end, and she's the daughter of the Norfolk Folk. That is.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who inevitably, of course, called an angry young woman because, you know, Osborne et al were called angry young men, but you weren't particularly angry, I think you were pretty delighted”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nimrod from Elgar's enigma variations played by the Halle Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbari. A very important turning point came in your career, Joan Plowwright in nineteen fifty six. You'd have been in your mid twenties, and you were invited to join the new wave of directors, writers, and actors at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea. I mean, the names are amazing, aren't they? Arnold Wesker and John Osborne and Samuel Beckett, directed by George Devine and Tony Richardson, starring Tom Courtney, Allen Bates, Albert Finney, Peter O'Tour, you really must have felt, you know, you were in the right place at the right time. You really hit the spot, didn't you?”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you didn't need to do something else, because in the end you won a place at the old Vic Theatre School, didn't you? Yes, I did.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This it really in tribute to my mother It's Kathleen Ferrier I mean it is also because it's a memory of my first introduction to it when she played this record to me. They told me last night there were ships in the offing, and I hurried down to the deep rolling sea, but my eye could not sit wherever might be. Kathleen Ferrier singing Blow the wind southerly You went to London for an audition, Joan, when you were just a girl of sixteen for an audition in Soho. That was very daring.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But your father must have been Very worried about, I mean fathers don't like their daughters marrying men twenty two years older than themselves. No, no, he was very worried. Well, they both were, but They understood that it was a very deep love that it was what both of us perhaps needed at that time and I think my parents gradually realised that, you know, it was not just philandering, it was the depth of the relationship was nothing to do just with physical attraction or feeling thinking or falling in love it was an ideal of something that was kind of bigger than both of us and that is the formation of a company of actors that could be the best in the world, which is what he wanted.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, she ran away from home first of all, but it was not considered respectable to go into the theatre either as a dancer or an actress. She ran her own amateur dramatic society. When I first went home after my first success and people had sort of read about me, I would meet solicitors in the street or something going down the high street, and they would just say, Oh, well, of course, I mean, we're not at all surprised we saw your mother as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. So you obviously fulfilled her dreams in spades. You also married the great actor of the era, Lawrence Olivia. She must have been thrilled to bits, was she when you married him? Not at the beginning. She wasn't quite sure what was going on at the beginning. She thought he was a bit of a philanderer. But of course we had both fallen in love with him as Heathcliff In the film of Wuthering Heights, yes.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Judy Garland singing over the rainbow from the film The Wizard of Oz and reminds you Dame Joan Ploughwright of Escaping from Scandalpo dreaming of escaping from Scandal. Not that, as I understand it, your father wanted you to. He was editor of the local newspaper, wasn't he? The Scunthrop and Frodingham Star. Now he wanted you to be a journalist, didn't he? Yet he did. I think he thought it was such a precarious profession, the one I wanted to go into. His only experience of it had been bailing out chorus girls who'd been stranded in Gainesborough, where he first started as a cub reporter, and he thought it was a dreadful profession. Obviously, you had your mother's jeans. She was in amateur dramatics. She'd wanted to be a ballet dancer. Oh yes.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“on my wall have kind of turrets and Persian minorets it was so sort of exotic and far away and it made me think I want some sort of adventure in some world that I have never seen yet I want to go places I want to get out of here”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were limitations So you were a very modern young woman it's not surprising probably you did end up in the new wave at the royal court, is it? Yes, and That was the place for all of us having to London from the provinces Because you were always going to get out of the provinces, weren't you? That was always your ambition. Oh yes, I didn't want to stay any longer in a small town. I mean my mother, who had a lot of longings and yearnings for theatre ballet music. I think she was always telling all three of us You must go out into a wider world and you fulfilled her dreams really, perhaps, did you? I guess I did, yes. Yes. Tell me about your first record. I chose this one because I've always loved Judy Garland. It's just the theme of this particular song which I used to sing when I was a girl and dream about when I went to bed there was a picture.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“time here being simply myself, a line she might perhaps identify with in real life she is of course Dame Joan Ploughwright. Do you identify with Mrs Palfrey Joan? Do you relish now in your mid seventies being fully your own person? Yes I think I do I don't think all my life has actually been spent as Mrs Palfreys was because Mrs Palfrey did dedicate everything to a marriage and her husband and followed him everywhere. I think I've always kept a little nugget of Joan Plowwright even when I became Lady Olivia. You have always been your own person, really, haven't you? Your brother David has said of you when you were a girl, you know you made no concessions to being a woman you wanted to be captain of the football team, you wanted to be the best at everything. I think I never actually realised”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My castaway this week is an actress, she's one of the great ladies of the British stage and has been at the forefront of her profession since she first appeared at the Royal Court Theatre in London half a century ago. In those days she was identified with the new wave appearing in plays by writers such as Arnold Wesker and John Osborne. She went on to make her name in more established roles winning actress of the year for her performance as Shaw's Saint Joan, and then through her marriage to Lawrence Olivier became closely associated with his work at Chichester and the foundation of the National Theatre. They were married for twenty eight years. Since his death in nineteen eighty nine she's added a career in film to her theatre work. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Enchanted April, and her latest film, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, will be released later this year. In it the eponymous heroine says most of my life I have been somebody's daughter, somebody's wife, and somebody's mother. I would like to spend the rest of my life.”
2006-08-27 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Plowright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source